NYC Midnight: Challenge #3
Group 7
Genre: Open
Location: Abandoned Factory
Object: Stick of Butter
She seems, from below, impossibly tiny. Arms little more than twigs. Prominent knees protruding from beneath her skirt. Faded pink sundress hanging from too-thin shoulders. She should look ridiculous up there in the rafters. I should laugh at the sight of her, hand-me-down clothes and cropped blonde locks, hacked with the scissors she found in my mother’s sewing basket.
Something about her silences me. Her white toes curl around the edge of the beam. She tilts her chin up. She lifts her arms in a slow fluid motion, thin fingers reaching for the watery sunlight that filters through the grimy windows above.
In this moment she is beautiful.
*
It was the only place I was ever alone.
At home it was Karen’s mushy music and Karen’s giggling friends and endless sighing and eye-rolling about the trouble with little brothers.
I liked the old factory, even though it was three miles by bike out the old town line. O’Neill’s Shoes, it still said on the outside, the faded white paint peeling off in flakes.
It smelled inside. Not bad, exactly, just stale and musty. There was dust everywhere and the floors creaked, but I liked the beams that criss-crossed the room high above and the rows of small square windows that let in a spooky, shadowed half-light.
One day when I got there, another bike was leaning against the building. It was small and pink.
I tiptoed inside and looked around, but I didn’t see anyone.
Then I heard a giggle above.
I looked up and saw the short girl from school, the one with the blonde curly hair whose mom had left town. (Right about the same time that Mr. Wilson the principal got thrown out by his wife. I knew that bit because I heard Mom telling Aunt Dot.) The girl was sitting on a beam, swinging her skinny legs.
“Hey,” she said with a grin that seemed too big for her face. “I’m Cora.”
I found myself grinning back.
“I know,” I said. “I’m Simon.”
*
We always biked out together after that. Cora brought stuff along in her old green rucksack, like a camping lantern and some old cushions for us to sit on.
Once she brought a picnic – pickles, baloney, apples, two buns and a stick of butter. She forgot a knife for the butter, though.
I laughed at her. She laughed at me back.
“Who needs a knife?” she said.
She unwrapped the butter and took a great big bite out of it, as if it was a chocolate bar.
“That’s gross,” I said.
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. It’s good. Try it.”
Her thin hand thrust the butter at me, and I leaned forward to take a bite.
It was no Baby Ruth. But actually it wasn’t bad.
*
I almost kissed her there. Just once.
We were fourteen.
She climbed into the rafters like she always had, using an old countertop and shelves to scramble up until she could reach the iron rail she used as a handhold.
I never did like climbing. I watched from the ground as she mounted the beam and got to her feet, hands on hips, pointed elbows jutting out.
She twirled on one leg in a slow, effortless spin that stopped my heart.
She was grinning triumphantly when she climbed back down.
The triumph faded when she looked at my face.
“Don’t look so worried, silly. As if I’d ever fall.”
She hugged me then.
She felt soft. I caught a whiff of something in her curls, something sweet and flowery that reminded me of summer.
She lingered for a moment. I had lost my ability to move or speak.
She drew away.
*
The first time we drank beer, we were sitting cross-legged on the old cushions in the darkest corner. She brought four bottles in her rucksack. Her dad wouldn’t miss them, she said.
It tasted awful. I didn’t finish mine.
She was on her third when she blurted it out.
“My father touches me.”
I didn’t get it. I just stared at her.
Then it came pouring out, the words a staccato volley that ricocheted off the walls and fired back at us so hard they hurt. I sat with my knees drawn up tight against me, hugging them to my chest, as if I was the one in need of protection.
I don’t remember the words she used. Only these:
“I don’t see why. I’m not even pretty.”
I reached out and stroked her cheek, then buried my hand in her hair.
“Yes, you are.”
We sat like that for a long time.
The next day she came to my house to get Mom’s scissors.
*
I could have asked her to live with us. I could have called Karen. She was living in the city by then. She could have helped Cora get away.
For a long time those thoughts ran around my brain in an endless circle until I wanted to scream. Sometimes I did scream. I’d pedal out to the factory as fast as I could and I’d stand in the middle of the room and I’d yell until the birds flew out of the rafters.
I thought, then, that I could have stopped her.
I don’t think so now.
I think everything that was in her, all the pain and the darkness that was swallowing her up, I think that’s what propelled her. I think the force that made her take that step was too big, too powerful, for me or her or anyone else to overcome.
In my dreams I never see the end. The slow-motion plummet. The thin white crumpled body.
I see her in that one moment only. She’s poised there, luminous in shadow – toes curled around the beam, chin uptilted, arms upstretched as she reaches for the light.
She is always beautiful.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Who inspires you? A tribute
This one's from my work blog (In the Spotlight, at www.burnabynow.com), but I kinda liked it so I wanted to share it here too.
In the course of blogging about an old musical coming to the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby, I recalled my old singing teacher and her love of Broadway musicals. Which made me remember just how much that teacher had inspired me, in music and in life. Which caused me to sit down and compose the piece below.
This is in memory of Joyce Langford, who was a voice and piano teacher in Barrie, Ontario – where, as many of you know, I grew up – and one of the founders of what is now the Barrie Kiwanis Music Festival.
This piece is long, but I beg your indulgence. And I invite you to respond with your comments. Who inspired you as a child? Who taught you lessons early in life that have stuck with you to this day? Who inspires you now? Who's your muse?
Here's my story. I look forward to yours.
********
She sits on my shoulder still.
She doesn’t sit quietly, either. She’s not the kind of guardian angel who just gently nudges you in the right direction or the muse who whispers ever-so-softly in your ear.
She’s more of a full-on, high-energy, go-get-’em sort of angel.
Joyce Langford was my singing teacher.
I was nine years old when I started taking lessons from her.
I remember from those first few lessons how much time she spent talking about learning how to breathe. I never thought before then that breathing was anything special. Everybody did it, after all.
I soon learned how wrong I was. I learned the word “diaphragm” long before I could have spelled it. And I learned how to use mine. For awhile, I didn’t spend much time singing. I spent more time lying down on the piano bench, with a hardcover book on my stomach, practising breathing in and out until I could watch that book rise and fall oh-so-smoothly.
It was the first of many lessons Mrs. Langford would teach me – and not just about singing.
Oh, I learned plenty about how to sing: about the mechanics of voice production, about the importance of proper diction, about shaping and phrasing lines of music, about colour and tone and pitch.
But she taught me a lot more than that.
Mrs. Langford taught me that the biggest factor in making anything a success isn’t natural talent so much as determination and effort.
Over our years of weekly lessons, she developed a habit of pulling pieces of music out of her overflowing cabinets that I’d look at and think, “Really? She expects me to sing that?”
But she’d work with me, and it would slowly start to make sense. I would find notes I didn’t know I could sing. I remember one particular Christmas song in which the climactic phrase crested at a glorious high A-flat. (Now, for a soprano, a glorious high A-flat is a walk in a park. But I’ve always been a mezzo, and the words “glorious” and “A-flat” don’t go together for me.) I didn’t hit it every time. Probably not even half the time. But when I did – on those rare moments when it all came together, when everything she taught me just coalesced and it all worked – there was nothing like the feeling of hearing the sound that I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of making.
It’s a lesson that’s stuck with me. Whatever I may lack in natural talent (and trust me when I tell you a great deal is lacking), I know I can go a great distance to making up for it with stubbornness and sheer pigheaded hard work.
Mrs. Langford taught me that excuses are just that: excuses.
She never let me get away with missing my practice for something so trivial as illness or with hiding behind a sore throat or a cough if my performance wasn’t up to snuff.
Her lessons in rising to the occasion in the face of physical adversity still come back to me those times when I’m under the weather and tempted to miss a choir rehearsal – or, for that matter, any other task that requires dedication. When I whine about having a cold or the flu, when I’m feeling sick and tired and just want to curl up under the covers and go back to bed, I hear her.
“You can sing a whole opera with a cold!” she’d proclaim in her best impersonation of the Italian operatic diva who had been her own teacher once upon a time.
It always gets me up.
I’m not always happy about rolling out of bed. But some part of me smiles, every time, because I can see Mrs. Langford beaming at me.
Mrs. Langford taught me confidence.
Her encouragement was sometimes gentle and sometimes had the subtlety of a cattle prod. But, under her watchful eye, a shy, skinny kid who was too timid to raise her hand in class learned that she had the ability to stand in front of a room full of people and sing to them with a straight spine, a broad smile and a clear, ringing sound.
That lesson has stood me well many times in life – in school, in personal interactions, in the professional world, in my creative projects. It pretty much boils down to: Believe you can, and you will.
It’s a creed that stems in large part from those weekly lessons in Mrs. Langford’s small basement studio.
Mrs. Langford got sick when I was in university. She fought cancer the same way she lived the rest of her life, with a laugh and a smile and a song.
I saw her once then, and her smile was as big as ever.
“Don’t worry, only the good die young,” she said, with her hearty laugh. “I’m going to live forever.”
God, it turns out, had other plans.
Mrs. Langford is still there for me.
She sits on my shoulder at choir practice and nods approvingly when I draw little faces in my score – to remind myself to smile or to open my mouth wider or to watch the director during a particular passage. She hovers over my laptop when I’m writing at home, frowning when I give up on myself because I think something’s not going well. She stands beside me and reminds me to breathe properly when I’m about to go on stage or walk in to a room full of strangers or when I’m facing a confrontation I don’t want to have.
I always smile when I think of Mrs. Langford.
Without her, I never would have learned how much difference music can make and how much joy singing can bring to the world. And I never would have known how many life lessons could be learned by one small girl in one small music studio.
I know there’s lots of music in heaven these days.
You can bet those angel choirs don’t get away with any lazy singing. And they sure don’t make excuses when the Hallelujah Chorus falls flat.
They just get back up and try and try and try until they get it right – so right that Mrs. Langford beams.
Then they sing some more.
In the course of blogging about an old musical coming to the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby, I recalled my old singing teacher and her love of Broadway musicals. Which made me remember just how much that teacher had inspired me, in music and in life. Which caused me to sit down and compose the piece below.
This is in memory of Joyce Langford, who was a voice and piano teacher in Barrie, Ontario – where, as many of you know, I grew up – and one of the founders of what is now the Barrie Kiwanis Music Festival.
This piece is long, but I beg your indulgence. And I invite you to respond with your comments. Who inspired you as a child? Who taught you lessons early in life that have stuck with you to this day? Who inspires you now? Who's your muse?
Here's my story. I look forward to yours.
********
She sits on my shoulder still.
She doesn’t sit quietly, either. She’s not the kind of guardian angel who just gently nudges you in the right direction or the muse who whispers ever-so-softly in your ear.
She’s more of a full-on, high-energy, go-get-’em sort of angel.
Joyce Langford was my singing teacher.
I was nine years old when I started taking lessons from her.
I remember from those first few lessons how much time she spent talking about learning how to breathe. I never thought before then that breathing was anything special. Everybody did it, after all.
I soon learned how wrong I was. I learned the word “diaphragm” long before I could have spelled it. And I learned how to use mine. For awhile, I didn’t spend much time singing. I spent more time lying down on the piano bench, with a hardcover book on my stomach, practising breathing in and out until I could watch that book rise and fall oh-so-smoothly.
It was the first of many lessons Mrs. Langford would teach me – and not just about singing.
Oh, I learned plenty about how to sing: about the mechanics of voice production, about the importance of proper diction, about shaping and phrasing lines of music, about colour and tone and pitch.
But she taught me a lot more than that.
Mrs. Langford taught me that the biggest factor in making anything a success isn’t natural talent so much as determination and effort.
Over our years of weekly lessons, she developed a habit of pulling pieces of music out of her overflowing cabinets that I’d look at and think, “Really? She expects me to sing that?”
But she’d work with me, and it would slowly start to make sense. I would find notes I didn’t know I could sing. I remember one particular Christmas song in which the climactic phrase crested at a glorious high A-flat. (Now, for a soprano, a glorious high A-flat is a walk in a park. But I’ve always been a mezzo, and the words “glorious” and “A-flat” don’t go together for me.) I didn’t hit it every time. Probably not even half the time. But when I did – on those rare moments when it all came together, when everything she taught me just coalesced and it all worked – there was nothing like the feeling of hearing the sound that I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of making.
It’s a lesson that’s stuck with me. Whatever I may lack in natural talent (and trust me when I tell you a great deal is lacking), I know I can go a great distance to making up for it with stubbornness and sheer pigheaded hard work.
Mrs. Langford taught me that excuses are just that: excuses.
She never let me get away with missing my practice for something so trivial as illness or with hiding behind a sore throat or a cough if my performance wasn’t up to snuff.
Her lessons in rising to the occasion in the face of physical adversity still come back to me those times when I’m under the weather and tempted to miss a choir rehearsal – or, for that matter, any other task that requires dedication. When I whine about having a cold or the flu, when I’m feeling sick and tired and just want to curl up under the covers and go back to bed, I hear her.
“You can sing a whole opera with a cold!” she’d proclaim in her best impersonation of the Italian operatic diva who had been her own teacher once upon a time.
It always gets me up.
I’m not always happy about rolling out of bed. But some part of me smiles, every time, because I can see Mrs. Langford beaming at me.
Mrs. Langford taught me confidence.
Her encouragement was sometimes gentle and sometimes had the subtlety of a cattle prod. But, under her watchful eye, a shy, skinny kid who was too timid to raise her hand in class learned that she had the ability to stand in front of a room full of people and sing to them with a straight spine, a broad smile and a clear, ringing sound.
That lesson has stood me well many times in life – in school, in personal interactions, in the professional world, in my creative projects. It pretty much boils down to: Believe you can, and you will.
It’s a creed that stems in large part from those weekly lessons in Mrs. Langford’s small basement studio.
Mrs. Langford got sick when I was in university. She fought cancer the same way she lived the rest of her life, with a laugh and a smile and a song.
I saw her once then, and her smile was as big as ever.
“Don’t worry, only the good die young,” she said, with her hearty laugh. “I’m going to live forever.”
God, it turns out, had other plans.
Mrs. Langford is still there for me.
She sits on my shoulder at choir practice and nods approvingly when I draw little faces in my score – to remind myself to smile or to open my mouth wider or to watch the director during a particular passage. She hovers over my laptop when I’m writing at home, frowning when I give up on myself because I think something’s not going well. She stands beside me and reminds me to breathe properly when I’m about to go on stage or walk in to a room full of strangers or when I’m facing a confrontation I don’t want to have.
I always smile when I think of Mrs. Langford.
Without her, I never would have learned how much difference music can make and how much joy singing can bring to the world. And I never would have known how many life lessons could be learned by one small girl in one small music studio.
I know there’s lots of music in heaven these days.
You can bet those angel choirs don’t get away with any lazy singing. And they sure don’t make excuses when the Hallelujah Chorus falls flat.
They just get back up and try and try and try until they get it right – so right that Mrs. Langford beams.
Then they sing some more.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Advice for Life
Written for a class at UBC, in which -bucking all advice usually given to writers to expel pesky little ly adverbs from their vocabulary - we were asked to compose something made up mostly of adverbs.
*
sing
joyously ardently soulfully enthusiastically
dance
blithely freely twirlingly dizzyingly
laugh
foolishly infectiously loudly outrageously
give
selflessly generously compassionately extravagantly
write
imaginatively truthfully fluidly uninhibitedly
speak
sincerely honestly courageously meaningfully
love
genuinely passionately intensely magically
live
playfully appreciatively mindfully wonderingly
*
sing
joyously ardently soulfully enthusiastically
dance
blithely freely twirlingly dizzyingly
laugh
foolishly infectiously loudly outrageously
give
selflessly generously compassionately extravagantly
write
imaginatively truthfully fluidly uninhibitedly
speak
sincerely honestly courageously meaningfully
love
genuinely passionately intensely magically
live
playfully appreciatively mindfully wonderingly
Untitled - Of a Pig, a Teacup and a Barbie Doll
Another Sunday afternoon writers' group challenge. Lacking a title as of this moment. Please feel free to suggest!
Among the required elements this time: The first and last sentence, as presented; required items including pink cake, a magic wand, bobby pins, a mesh tank top; required vocaulary including elixir, bailiwock, detritus, fuddy-duddy, muse, shiatsu, kitsch, malfeasance and probably more that elude me at this moment!
*
Who knew that a pig, a teacup and a Barbie doll would turn out to be so important? Not Graham, certainly. He has no feeling of prescience as he rolls lazily over and squints at the unexpected sunshine. He considers the possibility that a magnanimous fairy has waved her wand and allowed him to sleep through another Vancouver winter.
Then it comes back to him, piece by piece, fragments that feel not like memory but like snatches of a movie. A teasing smile. A shared laugh. A flicker of unexpected something in the blue eyes. A touch of slim fingers on his forearm.
He realizes that the magic elixir that brought sunshine into this November morning originated not in the realm of imagination that is his usual bailiwick but in the kitchen of his third-floor apartment.
Their apartment.
Graham groans as that flash of reality interrupts his interior movie before it gets to the good bit. He allows himself to fast-forward to the moment when slim blue jeans, pink T-shirt and some scrap of black lace that was much too small to be underwear joined his hastily shed khakis and button-down in a heap on his bedroom floor.
He is about to permit himself the indulgence of recalling the softness of the white skin when reality intrudes again.
Mo. It was Mo. Mo-from-Grade 3. Mo-his-childhood-partner-in-crime. Mo-his-roommate who’d moved in after the jackass broke her heart and Graham insisted he should look after her.
You sure know how to look after a damsel in distress, jeers a voice in Graham’s mind. Rather unkindly, he thinks, considering he wasn’t the one who made the first move.
She came onto me, remember? he tells the voice.
And how much had she had to drink at the time? the voice jeers back.
“Oh, shut up,” he mutters to the voice, swinging his legs onto the floor. The morning chill hits him, and he’s surprised to discover he’s not wearing his blue-and-white-striped pyjamas.
Mo gets no end of fun out of those pyjamas. “You look like an old fuddy-duddy,” she teased the first time she saw them. “You’ll have to get some different sleepwear if you’re going to show off that studly body to the ladies.”
He blushed then. And he feels himself blushing now as he recalls it hadn’t required any sleepwear at all to convince Mo of his aforementioned studliness.
He can’t help the smile that creeps across his face, though he does his best to quench it as he reaches for the navy terrycloth robe. He neatly knots the belt, wondering as he does so if the robe is too middle-aged for a guy who isn’t even twenty-five yet.
He hears the shower running as he heads towards the kitchen and isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that he won’t find Mo at the table.
Graham can feel himself holding his breath as he measures out Raisin Bran, pours milk and sets the coffeepot in motion in an attempt at nonchalanace.
He grabs his laptop off the counter and flips it open, deciding to get the next scene written before Mo finishes her shower and beautification regime. He grins as he starts to type, realizing there may be hope for the hapless Edward and his unrequited love for the fair Rebecca. How, he wonders, should he get Edward to see it’s not hopeless after all? That there’s a chance Rebecca has been harbouring feelings for him all along?
Graham is startled out of his literary contemplation by the feel of two soft, warm hands on his shoulders.
“Hard at work already?” Mo’s voice is light and cheerful.
Her slim fingers begin their usual journey, massaging the stiffness out of his neck and working their gentle magic on the knot next to his left shoulder blade. It’s a familiar ritual that began during all-nighters in their university dorm days, but Graham can’t help wondering if it feels different to Mo today.
He allows his body to grow limp in her hands.
“Other writers have muses. I just have a shiatsu expert.” His answering tone is as light and cheerful as Mo’s own.
Mo’s fingers squeeze harder, making him wince. “Just? Most writers would kill for a live-in masseuse, you doorknob.”
She giggles, and after a moment Graham laughs too, telling himself that the old childhood insult is really a term of endearment.
They eat breakfast together companionably, albeit briefly, as Mo races her way through a cinnamon roll and an oversize mug of coffee – her preferred fuel for facing a classroom of six-year-olds.
The apartment seems lifeless after she leaves. Not just quieter – it always is, without Mo’s stream of chatter and ready giggle – but duller somehow.
Graham looks around, taking in the second-hand table and chairs and the poorly assembled Ikea cabinet that sits at a bit of a lean despite his best efforts to right it. It occurs to him it would be a nice gesture to make the place welcoming for Mo’s return home. Surely, he thinks as he closes his laptop, she can start considering it her home now. They can share his room. She can move out of the den – it’s too small to be a bedroom anyway, though she’d refused to let him trade. He won’t complain when his dresser is littered with baby powder and bobby pins and lipstick and that sweet-smelling goop in a purple jar she uses to smooth the frizz out of her honey-coloured curls.
Graham heads to the back closet, recalling that Mo stowed a few large boxes of belongings there when she arrived. He pulls down the top box, wondering which of her multitudinous knick-knacks he should use to decorate the apartment. He lifts the lid and finds her collection of travel souvenirs, grinning as he removes a miniature plastic Venetian gondola, a small marble Colisseum and an Eiffel Tower paperweight. He knows they’re amongst her favourites, though he mocks them as being kitsch of the most egregiously touristy kind.
A flash of pink makes him smile. He lifts it out and sees the piggy bank that’s been on Mo’s dresser since they were eight. There’s something about the pig’s determinedly cheerful pinkness, just-so curly tail and winsome painted smile that reminds him of Mo. (Not that he ever says that. An expert on women he is not – in the real world, they tend to behave in far more mysterious ways than does the fair Rebecca – but he’s astute enough to realize that being compared to a pig wouldn’t be considered a compliment.)
The pig will look good on their dresser, he thinks, and the tourist kitsch can live on the shelf over the TV.
He digs further and can’t help laughing as he finds Halloween costumes from years gone by, including the mesh tank top she’d made him wear to an ’80s retro party the same year she’d gone as Madonna in her Like A Virgin incarnation. Graham can feel his face flushing as he removes the lace bustier and fingerless gloves from the box, recalling how he’d gaped at the unfamiliar but far from unwelcome sight of Mo’s skin and how he’d blushed when she eyed him appraisingly and told him he should show off his flat stomach more often.
He shoves the clothes back in and moves on to the next box, discovering Mo’s dolls and stuffies. If he clears away some of his books, he thinks, he can find room for a few of her favourites on the shelf in their room. Contemplating the jumble of fur and cloth and painted smiles, he selects a rag doll made by her Granny, an old lop-earned plush rabbit, a stuffed elephant he won for her years ago at the PNE and a curly-haired Barbie doll in a pink dress that’s always reminded him of Mo.
The rest he puts away, reaching for the third box – this one marked, in Mo’s loopy script, “Fragile.” He peers inside and realizes it’s her Granny’s china, which she’s always said she’ll bring out when she has a home of her own and a china cabinet. Graham carefully removes one teacup and saucer, gilt-edged and covered with a delicate spray of roses and vines. He’ll make space for them on the counter for now, then he and Mo can go looking for a china cabinet on the weekend.
He spends the rest of the day absorbed in what he knows Mo would call “fussing,” dusting and arranging her knick-knacks on the living room shelf, making space for the stuffies in the bedroom and clearing his dresser top for Mo’s things. He hauls the dresser from the den across the hallway to his room, marvelling at how she’s managed to stuff so many clothes into its small drawers. He assesses the bed, wondering if Mo would prefer his blue duvet or her old pink-flowered comforter. He decides to leave it and let Mo make the decision later. Probably after dinner, once they’re curled up in the living room with wine.
Not for the first time, Graham thanks his lucky stars he’s a good cook – was it schadenfreude, he often wondered, that he had been so gleeful when Mo laughed to him after her third date with the jackass about the disaster that had been his attempt at beef Wellington. Who’d make beef Wellington for Mo anyway, Graham laughs to himself as he sets to work in the kitchen, when she’s clearly such a shepherd’s pie kind of gal.
And dessert? With Mo, that’s easy. Nothing can make her smile like the pink-iced chocolate cupcakes Graham makes – usually only for her birthday, but he’ll make an exception since tonight will be a special occasion.
His methodical culinary preparations are interrupted only once, by the ringing of the phone.
It’s Mo.
“Hey.” The sound of her voice bubbling across the line makes Graham smile. “I’m just heading out, but I wanted to let you know I’ll be an hour or so. I’ve got some things to do on the way home. It’s been a big day. I’ll tell you about it later.”
Graham feels his stomach flip a little, the way it used to when he’d clutch Mo’s arm on the old wooden rollercoaster at the PNE. What’s Mo going to surprise him with? He contemplates the question as he returns to mixing icing sugar and butter, wondering whether she’s stopping to pick up their favourite wine – the Wolf Blass shiraz would go quite well with his shepherd’s pie. Or maybe, he thinks as he feels his face grow hot again, she’s going to buy something special at La Vie En Rose.
Only the beeping of the oven timer prevents Graham from pursuing that line of thought, though he permits himself a vision of white skin in pink silk – or, dare he consider it, black lace? – as he sets the cupcakes out to cool.
The old clock on the living room wall ticks with an insistence that irritates him, an audible reminder of every long and painful minute that passes as he finishes his preparations, absorbed in visions of silk and lace and surrounded by the smells of shepherd’s pie and fresh-baked cupcakes.
He clears off the counter so she’ll be sure to notice her Granny’s cup and saucer. Then he decides he should bring a couple of her other favourite things out to the kitchen, to make a subtle statement about the fact that he’s decided to make the place hers as much as his.
He places the piggy bank and the Barbie doll on the counter with the teacup, unable to contain a small grin.
The only thing left, he thinks, is to make sure that appropriate music is playing when she walks in. He readies Clapton in the CD player, knowing she’ll appreciate his choice of songs. Then he perches on the edge of the couch and listens to each strident tick of the clock until he hears her in the hallway, stopping outside the door to scrabble in her purse for the keys.
Graham leans over to hit play as he hears the key in the lock, and Clapton starts to sing about her putting on her makeup and brushing her long blonde hair as the apartment door opens.
Graham looks up, feeling a smile and a blush suffuse his face, and wonders what he’ll say when she walks in.
Then.
He sees not Mo but the jackass. Followed by a grinning Mo, who skips over to Graham and throws her arms around him, appearing not to notice that Graham’s arms are frozen at his sides.
“I told you it was a big day!” Mo giggles and bounces like a small child with a Christmas stocking. “I was feeling kind of bummed today. Kind of off, you know? Maybe it was the hangover. But then Jamie called me at lunch and told me we had to talk, and we talked all through my lunch hour until I had to go back to class and then we met after work and talked some more, and it turns out he’s been totally missing me and we agreed we were complete idiots to break up just because of one stupid fight, and he’s asked me to move back in and we’re going to get back together!”
Mo’s dancing blue gaze takes in Graham.
“Oh, come on, dude, say something! Aren’t you happy to be getting rid of me?”
It occurs to Graham that neither he nor the jackass has spoken a word. This doesn’t entirely surprise him, since words have never been the jackass’s strong point and they’ve never had much to say to each other – the hockey-playing engineer and the piano-playing writer, neither making any attempt to mask his disdain for the other.
But Graham feels that he, at least, should say something.
“Dinner’s ready,” he manages, rather lamely. “Are you hungry?”
Mo sniffs the air appreciatively and glances towards the kitchen. “Wow, I wish we could stay, that smells amazing. What is it, beef Wellington?”
Before Graham can find his voice, Mo squeals and giggles again, racing over to the countertop where Graham has left her belongings.
“Ohmigosh Graham, you found the dishes! Cool. I had no idea what box I’d thrown them in and I was thinking it would be nice to bring them out once Jamie and I pick up that new cabinet at Ikea.”
She holds up the teacup for the jackass’s inspection. “Isn’t it gorgeous, hon? Won’t this set look great in our dining room?”
Again, she doesn’t wait for an answer. She races back to Graham and plants an enthusiastic kiss on his cheek. “You’re great, Graham, thanks a billion. Sorry we can’t stay. We’ve got to get home.”
She and the jackass exchange a glance that makes Graham feel something tighten in his chest, as though his lungs are being squeezed by an iron band that makes it impossible to take a normal breath.
The tightening becomes a sharp stab as the jackass reaches out an arm and wraps it around Mo’s waist, and they move as one towards the door.
“But …” Graham can’t prevent the protest from escaping his lips.
Mo stops and turns.
“But, your things,” Graham says weakly, gesturing at the pile on the kitchen counter.
Mo’s glance takes in the detritus of Graham’s shattered hopes without a flicker. She waves an airy hand at the Barbie doll, the pig and the teacup.
“Oh, that’s no biggie. We’ll come by later and get all my stuff. Maybe on the weekend? And I’ll leave your key then too, if that’s okay?”
Graham feels certain that the fairy in charge of doling out magic elixirs has committed some malfeasance. Because surely he cannot be watching Mo lean her head against the jackass’s chest and smile up at him as she reaches for the door.
Don’t go, he wants to say. You’re making a mistake.
But he can’t speak.
Leaving it all behind, she slowly walks away.
Among the required elements this time: The first and last sentence, as presented; required items including pink cake, a magic wand, bobby pins, a mesh tank top; required vocaulary including elixir, bailiwock, detritus, fuddy-duddy, muse, shiatsu, kitsch, malfeasance and probably more that elude me at this moment!
*
Who knew that a pig, a teacup and a Barbie doll would turn out to be so important? Not Graham, certainly. He has no feeling of prescience as he rolls lazily over and squints at the unexpected sunshine. He considers the possibility that a magnanimous fairy has waved her wand and allowed him to sleep through another Vancouver winter.
Then it comes back to him, piece by piece, fragments that feel not like memory but like snatches of a movie. A teasing smile. A shared laugh. A flicker of unexpected something in the blue eyes. A touch of slim fingers on his forearm.
He realizes that the magic elixir that brought sunshine into this November morning originated not in the realm of imagination that is his usual bailiwick but in the kitchen of his third-floor apartment.
Their apartment.
Graham groans as that flash of reality interrupts his interior movie before it gets to the good bit. He allows himself to fast-forward to the moment when slim blue jeans, pink T-shirt and some scrap of black lace that was much too small to be underwear joined his hastily shed khakis and button-down in a heap on his bedroom floor.
He is about to permit himself the indulgence of recalling the softness of the white skin when reality intrudes again.
Mo. It was Mo. Mo-from-Grade 3. Mo-his-childhood-partner-in-crime. Mo-his-roommate who’d moved in after the jackass broke her heart and Graham insisted he should look after her.
You sure know how to look after a damsel in distress, jeers a voice in Graham’s mind. Rather unkindly, he thinks, considering he wasn’t the one who made the first move.
She came onto me, remember? he tells the voice.
And how much had she had to drink at the time? the voice jeers back.
“Oh, shut up,” he mutters to the voice, swinging his legs onto the floor. The morning chill hits him, and he’s surprised to discover he’s not wearing his blue-and-white-striped pyjamas.
Mo gets no end of fun out of those pyjamas. “You look like an old fuddy-duddy,” she teased the first time she saw them. “You’ll have to get some different sleepwear if you’re going to show off that studly body to the ladies.”
He blushed then. And he feels himself blushing now as he recalls it hadn’t required any sleepwear at all to convince Mo of his aforementioned studliness.
He can’t help the smile that creeps across his face, though he does his best to quench it as he reaches for the navy terrycloth robe. He neatly knots the belt, wondering as he does so if the robe is too middle-aged for a guy who isn’t even twenty-five yet.
He hears the shower running as he heads towards the kitchen and isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that he won’t find Mo at the table.
Graham can feel himself holding his breath as he measures out Raisin Bran, pours milk and sets the coffeepot in motion in an attempt at nonchalanace.
He grabs his laptop off the counter and flips it open, deciding to get the next scene written before Mo finishes her shower and beautification regime. He grins as he starts to type, realizing there may be hope for the hapless Edward and his unrequited love for the fair Rebecca. How, he wonders, should he get Edward to see it’s not hopeless after all? That there’s a chance Rebecca has been harbouring feelings for him all along?
Graham is startled out of his literary contemplation by the feel of two soft, warm hands on his shoulders.
“Hard at work already?” Mo’s voice is light and cheerful.
Her slim fingers begin their usual journey, massaging the stiffness out of his neck and working their gentle magic on the knot next to his left shoulder blade. It’s a familiar ritual that began during all-nighters in their university dorm days, but Graham can’t help wondering if it feels different to Mo today.
He allows his body to grow limp in her hands.
“Other writers have muses. I just have a shiatsu expert.” His answering tone is as light and cheerful as Mo’s own.
Mo’s fingers squeeze harder, making him wince. “Just? Most writers would kill for a live-in masseuse, you doorknob.”
She giggles, and after a moment Graham laughs too, telling himself that the old childhood insult is really a term of endearment.
They eat breakfast together companionably, albeit briefly, as Mo races her way through a cinnamon roll and an oversize mug of coffee – her preferred fuel for facing a classroom of six-year-olds.
The apartment seems lifeless after she leaves. Not just quieter – it always is, without Mo’s stream of chatter and ready giggle – but duller somehow.
Graham looks around, taking in the second-hand table and chairs and the poorly assembled Ikea cabinet that sits at a bit of a lean despite his best efforts to right it. It occurs to him it would be a nice gesture to make the place welcoming for Mo’s return home. Surely, he thinks as he closes his laptop, she can start considering it her home now. They can share his room. She can move out of the den – it’s too small to be a bedroom anyway, though she’d refused to let him trade. He won’t complain when his dresser is littered with baby powder and bobby pins and lipstick and that sweet-smelling goop in a purple jar she uses to smooth the frizz out of her honey-coloured curls.
Graham heads to the back closet, recalling that Mo stowed a few large boxes of belongings there when she arrived. He pulls down the top box, wondering which of her multitudinous knick-knacks he should use to decorate the apartment. He lifts the lid and finds her collection of travel souvenirs, grinning as he removes a miniature plastic Venetian gondola, a small marble Colisseum and an Eiffel Tower paperweight. He knows they’re amongst her favourites, though he mocks them as being kitsch of the most egregiously touristy kind.
A flash of pink makes him smile. He lifts it out and sees the piggy bank that’s been on Mo’s dresser since they were eight. There’s something about the pig’s determinedly cheerful pinkness, just-so curly tail and winsome painted smile that reminds him of Mo. (Not that he ever says that. An expert on women he is not – in the real world, they tend to behave in far more mysterious ways than does the fair Rebecca – but he’s astute enough to realize that being compared to a pig wouldn’t be considered a compliment.)
The pig will look good on their dresser, he thinks, and the tourist kitsch can live on the shelf over the TV.
He digs further and can’t help laughing as he finds Halloween costumes from years gone by, including the mesh tank top she’d made him wear to an ’80s retro party the same year she’d gone as Madonna in her Like A Virgin incarnation. Graham can feel his face flushing as he removes the lace bustier and fingerless gloves from the box, recalling how he’d gaped at the unfamiliar but far from unwelcome sight of Mo’s skin and how he’d blushed when she eyed him appraisingly and told him he should show off his flat stomach more often.
He shoves the clothes back in and moves on to the next box, discovering Mo’s dolls and stuffies. If he clears away some of his books, he thinks, he can find room for a few of her favourites on the shelf in their room. Contemplating the jumble of fur and cloth and painted smiles, he selects a rag doll made by her Granny, an old lop-earned plush rabbit, a stuffed elephant he won for her years ago at the PNE and a curly-haired Barbie doll in a pink dress that’s always reminded him of Mo.
The rest he puts away, reaching for the third box – this one marked, in Mo’s loopy script, “Fragile.” He peers inside and realizes it’s her Granny’s china, which she’s always said she’ll bring out when she has a home of her own and a china cabinet. Graham carefully removes one teacup and saucer, gilt-edged and covered with a delicate spray of roses and vines. He’ll make space for them on the counter for now, then he and Mo can go looking for a china cabinet on the weekend.
He spends the rest of the day absorbed in what he knows Mo would call “fussing,” dusting and arranging her knick-knacks on the living room shelf, making space for the stuffies in the bedroom and clearing his dresser top for Mo’s things. He hauls the dresser from the den across the hallway to his room, marvelling at how she’s managed to stuff so many clothes into its small drawers. He assesses the bed, wondering if Mo would prefer his blue duvet or her old pink-flowered comforter. He decides to leave it and let Mo make the decision later. Probably after dinner, once they’re curled up in the living room with wine.
Not for the first time, Graham thanks his lucky stars he’s a good cook – was it schadenfreude, he often wondered, that he had been so gleeful when Mo laughed to him after her third date with the jackass about the disaster that had been his attempt at beef Wellington. Who’d make beef Wellington for Mo anyway, Graham laughs to himself as he sets to work in the kitchen, when she’s clearly such a shepherd’s pie kind of gal.
And dessert? With Mo, that’s easy. Nothing can make her smile like the pink-iced chocolate cupcakes Graham makes – usually only for her birthday, but he’ll make an exception since tonight will be a special occasion.
His methodical culinary preparations are interrupted only once, by the ringing of the phone.
It’s Mo.
“Hey.” The sound of her voice bubbling across the line makes Graham smile. “I’m just heading out, but I wanted to let you know I’ll be an hour or so. I’ve got some things to do on the way home. It’s been a big day. I’ll tell you about it later.”
Graham feels his stomach flip a little, the way it used to when he’d clutch Mo’s arm on the old wooden rollercoaster at the PNE. What’s Mo going to surprise him with? He contemplates the question as he returns to mixing icing sugar and butter, wondering whether she’s stopping to pick up their favourite wine – the Wolf Blass shiraz would go quite well with his shepherd’s pie. Or maybe, he thinks as he feels his face grow hot again, she’s going to buy something special at La Vie En Rose.
Only the beeping of the oven timer prevents Graham from pursuing that line of thought, though he permits himself a vision of white skin in pink silk – or, dare he consider it, black lace? – as he sets the cupcakes out to cool.
The old clock on the living room wall ticks with an insistence that irritates him, an audible reminder of every long and painful minute that passes as he finishes his preparations, absorbed in visions of silk and lace and surrounded by the smells of shepherd’s pie and fresh-baked cupcakes.
He clears off the counter so she’ll be sure to notice her Granny’s cup and saucer. Then he decides he should bring a couple of her other favourite things out to the kitchen, to make a subtle statement about the fact that he’s decided to make the place hers as much as his.
He places the piggy bank and the Barbie doll on the counter with the teacup, unable to contain a small grin.
The only thing left, he thinks, is to make sure that appropriate music is playing when she walks in. He readies Clapton in the CD player, knowing she’ll appreciate his choice of songs. Then he perches on the edge of the couch and listens to each strident tick of the clock until he hears her in the hallway, stopping outside the door to scrabble in her purse for the keys.
Graham leans over to hit play as he hears the key in the lock, and Clapton starts to sing about her putting on her makeup and brushing her long blonde hair as the apartment door opens.
Graham looks up, feeling a smile and a blush suffuse his face, and wonders what he’ll say when she walks in.
Then.
He sees not Mo but the jackass. Followed by a grinning Mo, who skips over to Graham and throws her arms around him, appearing not to notice that Graham’s arms are frozen at his sides.
“I told you it was a big day!” Mo giggles and bounces like a small child with a Christmas stocking. “I was feeling kind of bummed today. Kind of off, you know? Maybe it was the hangover. But then Jamie called me at lunch and told me we had to talk, and we talked all through my lunch hour until I had to go back to class and then we met after work and talked some more, and it turns out he’s been totally missing me and we agreed we were complete idiots to break up just because of one stupid fight, and he’s asked me to move back in and we’re going to get back together!”
Mo’s dancing blue gaze takes in Graham.
“Oh, come on, dude, say something! Aren’t you happy to be getting rid of me?”
It occurs to Graham that neither he nor the jackass has spoken a word. This doesn’t entirely surprise him, since words have never been the jackass’s strong point and they’ve never had much to say to each other – the hockey-playing engineer and the piano-playing writer, neither making any attempt to mask his disdain for the other.
But Graham feels that he, at least, should say something.
“Dinner’s ready,” he manages, rather lamely. “Are you hungry?”
Mo sniffs the air appreciatively and glances towards the kitchen. “Wow, I wish we could stay, that smells amazing. What is it, beef Wellington?”
Before Graham can find his voice, Mo squeals and giggles again, racing over to the countertop where Graham has left her belongings.
“Ohmigosh Graham, you found the dishes! Cool. I had no idea what box I’d thrown them in and I was thinking it would be nice to bring them out once Jamie and I pick up that new cabinet at Ikea.”
She holds up the teacup for the jackass’s inspection. “Isn’t it gorgeous, hon? Won’t this set look great in our dining room?”
Again, she doesn’t wait for an answer. She races back to Graham and plants an enthusiastic kiss on his cheek. “You’re great, Graham, thanks a billion. Sorry we can’t stay. We’ve got to get home.”
She and the jackass exchange a glance that makes Graham feel something tighten in his chest, as though his lungs are being squeezed by an iron band that makes it impossible to take a normal breath.
The tightening becomes a sharp stab as the jackass reaches out an arm and wraps it around Mo’s waist, and they move as one towards the door.
“But …” Graham can’t prevent the protest from escaping his lips.
Mo stops and turns.
“But, your things,” Graham says weakly, gesturing at the pile on the kitchen counter.
Mo’s glance takes in the detritus of Graham’s shattered hopes without a flicker. She waves an airy hand at the Barbie doll, the pig and the teacup.
“Oh, that’s no biggie. We’ll come by later and get all my stuff. Maybe on the weekend? And I’ll leave your key then too, if that’s okay?”
Graham feels certain that the fairy in charge of doling out magic elixirs has committed some malfeasance. Because surely he cannot be watching Mo lean her head against the jackass’s chest and smile up at him as she reaches for the door.
Don’t go, he wants to say. You’re making a mistake.
But he can’t speak.
Leaving it all behind, she slowly walks away.
Rewind
This one was also written for the Sunday afternoon writers' group, stemming from a "challenge" we created involving a number of required elements.
Among them was certain required vocabulary (shillelagh, bellwether, cloisonné, tawdry, and I can't recall what else), the presence of a character important to the plot who says nothing at all, and the use of multiple words falling into the same general "category" of item (in this case, colours).
I forget what all the other requirements were. In any case, here's the story!
*
REWIND
If I told it backwards, would you be walking up the sidewalk right now?
Would you be ringing the buzzer with two insistent presses, galloping up the stairs three at a time, throwing open my apartment door, propelling yourself inside and throwing your battered brown leather jacket on the couch in one fluid motion?
If I told it backwards, would you still be here?
I wonder.
*
November.
The wind is rattling my apartment windows, the rain streaking down the balcony doors in relentless rivers of grey. It’s silent. Too silent. And dark. It’s as if the heavy grey that hangs over the world has seeped inside and begun to suck all the colour out of my room – the green of my throw cushions, the red of your hair, the faded blue of your jeans.
You speak. Finally. Four words.
Four words with the power to make the earth tilt and the room begin to sway around me.
“Don’t, Siobhan. It’s over.”
You’ve used my full name. You haven’t shortened it to Shiv, as you have from the beginning, since I told you how much I despise ‘Siobhan.’ Such a shamrock-and-shillelagh name belongs on a red-haired Irish lass or a dark Celtic princess – not a short, sandy-haired schoolteacher who’s still trying to erase the flat Toronto vowels from her recently acquired West Coast voice.
I realize that you must have heard me. The words are so freshly spoken they seem to echo off the beige walls.
Why are you being like this.
We can work it out.
What can I do to make you happy.
Tell me what I can do.
These are the words I just heard spoken in a voice that wasn’t my own. A pleading, begging, beseeching voice that has lost all trace of laughter and confidence and self.
I am not here witnessing my own disintegration in the face of your implacable refusal to engage in conversation.
I am not watching you stand like that, so tall and still. Your eyes – always a bellwether of your mood – are fixed on an invisible point six inches above my head. You’re not lounging with a cat’s lazy grace on the cushions on my floor, turning the light of your green gaze on me as though drinking in every inch of my being.
When did you stop looking at me like that, I wonder. Why did I let it happen.
Why am I watching this.
You turn around, sling your jacket over one shoulder and cross to the door in three strides. You are in the hall before my powers of speech return. By the time I can say “wait,” I hear your feet pounding down the stairwell. It’s too late to do anything but crumple onto the cushions at my feet.
And cry.
*
August.
It’s a hot day. Sweltering, by Vancouver standards, with the mercury nearly hitting thirty as Karen, Paula and I help Sheila and her voluminous ivory taffeta skirts out of the limousine and into the church.
I have no time to find you before the service starts. Sheila, determined to uphold the old-new-borrowed-blue tradition, insists that I fasten my silver charm bracelet onto her wrist even as she secures her grandmother’s cloisonné pendant around her neck. (The blue garter – a present from Karen, naturally – has already been donned.)
I spot your copper curls immediately as I begin my walk down the aisle, and I glance sideways at you as I pass. You give me a thumbs-up and purse your lips in what’s meant to be a silent whistle, and I know I’m reaping the rewards of the two hours in the salon – makeup and updo aren’t my usual style, but Sheila insisted that anyone in a floor-length emerald satin dress had to have the works to go with it.
I feel a grin creeping across my face. You look pretty hot yourself, I must admit. There’s something to be said for the dark suit and deep green tie, lending you an air of elegance instead of the casual grace with which you usually wear your jeans and button-down shirts.
And you look happy to be here after all. I knew you would be.
Though I can’t help but notice that you’re not smiling quite as broadly when I walk by you on the way out, still wiping the tears from my eyes – they misted over at “for better or for worse,” and I never regained control. You don’t catch my eye this time. You’re staring to the other side of the church and you look restless. Bored.
But you kiss me and pay the expected compliments to me and the girls when we find you after the ceremony. Paula and Karen don’t seem to notice anything amiss as we all pile into Tim’s van for the ride to the hall.
You don’t reach for my hand when we get out of the van, though between purse and bouquet I don’t really have a free hand anyway. And what with the chatter and speeches and tears all around, it’s not too surprising that we hardly exchange two words during dinner.
But you’re slow to invite me to the dance floor when the music begins. You only move after Karen prods you when the DJ offers up our favourite Damien Rice song.
I lean in close to you and tilt my head up to sing into your ear. “I can’t take my eyes off of you,” Damien and I croon together.
Your hand doesn’t creep further round my back. You don’t lean your head down to sing back. You straighten up a little, shifting your body away from me almost imperceptibly, so slightly I almost convince myself I’m imagining it. Then I lean back a little so I can look up at your face.
You’re surveying it all – the tulle and white lights and yellow roses and crowded dance floor – with a look that suggests not so much boredom as a mix of fear and resignation. The sort of look one might expect on the face of a death row inmate whose appeals have all expired and who knows his date with destiny won’t be postponed this time.
I feel myself stiffen, drawing away without letting go.
“I’m sorry, am I boring you?”
I fail in my efforts to make the comment sound light and flippant, and the bitter sarcasm rings more loudly than I expected.
Your right hand loosens its hold on my waist, and the fingers of your left hand free themselves from our intertwined grip. You’re still touching me, but barely, and you answer me with only a shrug.
Your feet and hips are still moving, and I know I should let it go and just keep dancing. But I can’t seem to stop the words from coming out of my mouth.
“No, really, do you not want to be here? Because we could leave. I mean, Sheila’s only one of my best friends and I’m only one of the bridesmaids. It’s not really that big of a day, is it? It’s just a wedding.”
The bitter venom with which I spit out that final word makes Sheila’s elderly aunt and uncle, dancing next to us, turn their heads our way. They politely avert their gazes as you let your right hand fall from my waist and deliberately remove your left from what remains of our contact.
You turn on one heel and stride across the dance floor towards the exit.
I follow, ignoring the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that resembles the tension I always feel going up the first hill on the old wooden rollercoaster at the PNE. Ignoring the voice that says not to ask. Not to start a fight.
Though it isn’t a fight really, is it?
A fight would imply that voices are raised, points of view are exchanged, arguments are made on one side, then another.
Not that one person – me – does all the talking, throwing out a series of questions.
What’s wrong. Why are you being like this. Do you not want to be here.
Not that the other person – you – dodges all the questions, pleading a headache, a dislike of crowds and loud music, a need to get some air.
I avoid pointing out that your Saturday nights out with the hockey guys are almost always spent in bars where music is surely played louder than the DJ’s understated, approved-by-mother-of-the-groom volume.
I avoid reminding you that it’s my friend’s wedding and I look beautiful and we should be in there, wrapped around each other on the dance floor, enjoying the romance of it all.
I ignore the little voice that says it isn’t the first time you’ve seemed distant. Aloof. As if you wanted to be anywhere but with me.
I stroke your forehead instead, smoothing the furrow in your brow, murmuring soothing words about hanging in there, making an effort to enjoy it for Sheila’s sake.
I make sure we’re on the patio when the bouquet and garter are tossed. I wonder if you see the kiss Tim gives Karen after she makes a flying leap to catch the bouquet. But I don’t ask.
When you drop me off at my front door at the end of the night, you yawn and say you need your sleep because you have an early morning practice.
I don’t ask you in.
*
June.
The spring breeze is ruffling your hair as you loll back on the grey flannel blanket, popping another olive into your mouth before taking a slow and deliberate sip from your glass of wine.
You’re staring off over the river, attention focused on a tugboat towing a log boom slowly past. The sun dances on the water’s surface – the Fraser is in one of its merry moods today, its depths an ever-shifting palette of blues and silvers.
I’m shivering, though, feeling the chill bite of the wind off the water, and I can’t find a comfortable spot on the blanket. A rock digs into my tailbone as I wiggle into a cross-legged pose.
I wasn’t supposed to be having this conversation. I thought the moment I mentioned the wedding, you’d be asking which tie you should wear. Not avoiding my gaze when I asked, playfully, if you’d mind if I caught the bouquet. Not making lame excuses about having stuff to do on a Saturday afternoon in August and maybe being too busy to come.
“What do you mean you’re busy?”
I try for a light, inquisitive tone but the result is strident and whiny. You don’t say anything, and I hear my words tumble over themselves as I race on.
“It’s a wedding, Mark. Sheila’s wedding. Sheila! She was my first friend in B.C. She saved me from dying of loneliness that first winter out here. I’m one of her bridesmaids, for heaven’s sakes. How can you be too busy for her wedding?”
There’s a long, heavy silence as you continue to follow the tugboat’s progress with fascination.
I allow the moment to grow until it feels like the longest pause in the history of human dialogue. Finally I accept that you have no intention of speaking, and I push aside the little voice that’s telling me not to beg.
I reach out and stroke your cheek.
“Please, Mark, will you come? For me?”
Sweetness and pleading don’t come naturally to me, and my tone sounds forced. But I see a smile start to play at the corners of your mouth. Then you turn back to face me and shrug in an open-armed, palms-up gesture of surrender.
You roll your green eyes at me, but you’ve given in to the smile.
When you lean forward to kiss me, it’s not hard to smile back.
*
April.
You sprawl there on the floor, lying back against the squashy green velvet cushions that have travelled with my boxes of belongings from my parents’ basement to here. My first real place – though you often laugh at the descriptor, pointing out that my bedroom window overlooks the tawdry 12th Street stroll and that the heavy chenille drapes on my balcony door obscure an excellent view of the bins where dumpster divers scrounge in the alley.
I don’t care. It’s my space and no one shares it. Except you.
I can hardly remember a Wednesday before you. Before your lazy smile and long legs and faded blue jeans became a part of the backdrop of my otherwise beige living room.
Funny that Wednesday is always our day. Remember? It started the day you called me at work and said you had to see me that week, suggesting a Wednesday get-together. I pushed aside the feeling that Wednesday was somehow a second-best sort of date night. That in picking it you were leaving your Fridays and Saturdays free for other things.
I never asked what other things. It never mattered after that first week. You said it was the perfect day to see me because, with Wednesday to look forward to, the week didn’t seem as long.
Now it’s a ritual. You arrive after work, ring the buzzer twice, race up the stairs with a bag of takeout and a rental DVD and fling yourself onto my cushions on the floor.
Today it’s lamb vindaloo and butter chicken from the Royal Tandoori Buffet. With a Mel Gibson double-feature for later: Maverick and Braveheart.
I curl up beside you, propped up on one elbow, nibbling at the chicken as I watch you plow enthusiastically into the vindaloo.
I’m smiling. One of those big stupid goofy smiles that I can’t control no matter how hard I try. It’s looking at you that does it. Sprawled there with a dollop of red sauce on your chin, copper curls tousled against the pillows, the freckles whose existence you try to deny a gentle spray of sunshine across your cheeks and nose.
I watch as my hand reaches out and strokes your face, obeying a compulsion that I no longer question. My fingers know every millimetre of this journey. The softness of your cheek, the roughness of the stubble along your jawline, the small bump in your nose where it was broken in a peewee hockey game nineteen years ago.
Your face softens, as it always does, the sharply etched features taking on the blurred outlines of a watercolour painting. The furrow in your forehead smooths. The tiny lines that radiate from the corners of your eyes dissipate as those eyes begin to close, lids at half-mast over the green pools of laughter beneath.
You chuckle slightly, the sound a deep purr in the back of your throat.
But you say nothing as my hand continues its journey, through your curls, down your neck, across your chest to the buttons on the crisp white shirt. One by one the buttons open, the cotton falling softly aside as my fingers wend their way towards the silver buckle on your belt.
Then your hand wanders to my neck, soft and cool as silk against the warmth of my skin, and your fingers trace a slow and gentle path down my spine to my tailbone.
We don’t finish the vindaloo. And we don’t watch the movies.
*
January.
I am cold and more than a little cranky as I perch on the hard bench at the edge of the arena and lace up the not-quite-white rental skates. I don’t want to be here.
It’s Karen’s fault. She got it into their heads that we should all head to Burnaby 8Rinks for the public skate this grey Sunday afternoon.
Heedless of my protests that my utter inability to skate was one of the motivating forces that made me move to the only place in Canada without outdoor rinks, Karen
insisted it would be a fun girls’ outing.
That a particular dark-haired, hockey-playing co-worker of hers just happened to be finishing up a practice on one of the other rinks as we were heading in for the public skate was, she insisted with a look of serene innocence, purely coincidental. That said co-worker called over to a few of his buddies and suggested they stick around for the public skate was equally unplanned on her part.
“Whatever,” I muttered at her, my attempt to vociferate objections drowned out by the giggles of the others, who insisted that having the men around would be fun.
Well and good for Sheila, who – courtesy of the sparkling diamond Robert gave her for Christmas – couldn’t care less what men think of her. And for Paula, who can actually skate. And for Karen, who can’t – but with saucy blonde curls and big blue eyes atop her tiny, perfectly proportioned frame, it isn’t often necessary for Karen to be good at anything. She just shows up, and everything else revolves around her.
Case in point: Moments ago, Karen put one tentative toe onto the ice, stumbled, and immediately found herself in the protective custody of Tim, the dark-haired co-worker, and some friend of his with the approximate build and hirsuteness of a gorilla.
So that leaves me. Alone on the hard cold bench, lacing up the ugly, uncomfortable skates.
I’m not about to skate, however. When it comes to attracting knights on shining blades, my mousy-brown locks don’t have the same drawing power as Karen’s sunshiny halo.
I decide to procrastinate by heading out to the vending machines in the hall. Though it means clumping awkwardly through a group of giggling teenage girls of the shining-haired, bare-midriffed variety (the kind of girls who made me uncomfortable when I was their age and who seem only marginally less intimidating at a distance of more than a decade), I figure the prospect of running the cheerleader gauntlet is less daunting than hitting the ice.
I crack open my Diet Coke – something in me still believes that I really will shed those ten pounds off my hips if only I never have the full-sugar variety – and turn to head back in to the bench.
When, in far less time than it takes to describe it, the following happens:
One giggling bare-midriffed girl nudges another as a tall, red-haired hockey player, resplendent in sweaty jersey, emerges from one of the rinks.
Second bare-midriffed girl turns to throw a dazzling smile at aforementioned hockey player, reaching out a hand to push shining chestnut tresses off her face. Not to be outdone, first bare-midriffed girl whirls to flash her own pearly whites.
Causing pink scarf to get caught in outstretched hand of second girl.
Who, caught in mid-pivot, stumbles into the path of red-haired hockey player.
Who, caught in mid-stride, starts to lose his balance, flinging his arms out to either side in a desperate attempt to avoid falling on either bare-midriffed girl.
And sends my newly opened Diet Coke flying – catching me, him and both bare-midriffed girls in a shower of cold brown stickiness.
“Watch it!” squeals one, in almost perfect stereo with the other’s “Dude, look out!”
They scatter with their friends in the general direction of the ladies’ washroom.
Leaving the tall, red-haired hockey player staring at me with sheepish green eyes.
The warm, throaty baritone that issues an apology for his clumsiness sends a zing running through my body, shooting electric warmth into my cold fingers and cranky toes. When the voice offers to buy me another, I start to say no. Then yes.
Then I grin up instead.
“No need,” I say, surprised by the confidence I hear in my laughing tone. “But I’ll take a skating lesson as payment, if you’d like.”
You stare for a moment, then the green eyes light with laughter, and you reach out a hand to lead me back to the rink.
Turns out skating’s pretty fun, actually.
*
There. It’s done. I told it backwards.
You haven’t walked away from the dance floor at Sheila’s wedding. I haven’t stood crying in my living room on a rainy afternoon and begged you not to leave.
You’re just coming over now. You’ll teach me to skate. We’ll watch videos and eat Wednesday takeout and curl up on the squashy cushions on my floor while my fingers trace the outlines of your face. It’s all just beginning now.
Will my heart be any less broken when it ends this time?
I wonder.
Among them was certain required vocabulary (shillelagh, bellwether, cloisonné, tawdry, and I can't recall what else), the presence of a character important to the plot who says nothing at all, and the use of multiple words falling into the same general "category" of item (in this case, colours).
I forget what all the other requirements were. In any case, here's the story!
*
REWIND
If I told it backwards, would you be walking up the sidewalk right now?
Would you be ringing the buzzer with two insistent presses, galloping up the stairs three at a time, throwing open my apartment door, propelling yourself inside and throwing your battered brown leather jacket on the couch in one fluid motion?
If I told it backwards, would you still be here?
I wonder.
*
November.
The wind is rattling my apartment windows, the rain streaking down the balcony doors in relentless rivers of grey. It’s silent. Too silent. And dark. It’s as if the heavy grey that hangs over the world has seeped inside and begun to suck all the colour out of my room – the green of my throw cushions, the red of your hair, the faded blue of your jeans.
You speak. Finally. Four words.
Four words with the power to make the earth tilt and the room begin to sway around me.
“Don’t, Siobhan. It’s over.”
You’ve used my full name. You haven’t shortened it to Shiv, as you have from the beginning, since I told you how much I despise ‘Siobhan.’ Such a shamrock-and-shillelagh name belongs on a red-haired Irish lass or a dark Celtic princess – not a short, sandy-haired schoolteacher who’s still trying to erase the flat Toronto vowels from her recently acquired West Coast voice.
I realize that you must have heard me. The words are so freshly spoken they seem to echo off the beige walls.
Why are you being like this.
We can work it out.
What can I do to make you happy.
Tell me what I can do.
These are the words I just heard spoken in a voice that wasn’t my own. A pleading, begging, beseeching voice that has lost all trace of laughter and confidence and self.
I am not here witnessing my own disintegration in the face of your implacable refusal to engage in conversation.
I am not watching you stand like that, so tall and still. Your eyes – always a bellwether of your mood – are fixed on an invisible point six inches above my head. You’re not lounging with a cat’s lazy grace on the cushions on my floor, turning the light of your green gaze on me as though drinking in every inch of my being.
When did you stop looking at me like that, I wonder. Why did I let it happen.
Why am I watching this.
You turn around, sling your jacket over one shoulder and cross to the door in three strides. You are in the hall before my powers of speech return. By the time I can say “wait,” I hear your feet pounding down the stairwell. It’s too late to do anything but crumple onto the cushions at my feet.
And cry.
*
August.
It’s a hot day. Sweltering, by Vancouver standards, with the mercury nearly hitting thirty as Karen, Paula and I help Sheila and her voluminous ivory taffeta skirts out of the limousine and into the church.
I have no time to find you before the service starts. Sheila, determined to uphold the old-new-borrowed-blue tradition, insists that I fasten my silver charm bracelet onto her wrist even as she secures her grandmother’s cloisonné pendant around her neck. (The blue garter – a present from Karen, naturally – has already been donned.)
I spot your copper curls immediately as I begin my walk down the aisle, and I glance sideways at you as I pass. You give me a thumbs-up and purse your lips in what’s meant to be a silent whistle, and I know I’m reaping the rewards of the two hours in the salon – makeup and updo aren’t my usual style, but Sheila insisted that anyone in a floor-length emerald satin dress had to have the works to go with it.
I feel a grin creeping across my face. You look pretty hot yourself, I must admit. There’s something to be said for the dark suit and deep green tie, lending you an air of elegance instead of the casual grace with which you usually wear your jeans and button-down shirts.
And you look happy to be here after all. I knew you would be.
Though I can’t help but notice that you’re not smiling quite as broadly when I walk by you on the way out, still wiping the tears from my eyes – they misted over at “for better or for worse,” and I never regained control. You don’t catch my eye this time. You’re staring to the other side of the church and you look restless. Bored.
But you kiss me and pay the expected compliments to me and the girls when we find you after the ceremony. Paula and Karen don’t seem to notice anything amiss as we all pile into Tim’s van for the ride to the hall.
You don’t reach for my hand when we get out of the van, though between purse and bouquet I don’t really have a free hand anyway. And what with the chatter and speeches and tears all around, it’s not too surprising that we hardly exchange two words during dinner.
But you’re slow to invite me to the dance floor when the music begins. You only move after Karen prods you when the DJ offers up our favourite Damien Rice song.
I lean in close to you and tilt my head up to sing into your ear. “I can’t take my eyes off of you,” Damien and I croon together.
Your hand doesn’t creep further round my back. You don’t lean your head down to sing back. You straighten up a little, shifting your body away from me almost imperceptibly, so slightly I almost convince myself I’m imagining it. Then I lean back a little so I can look up at your face.
You’re surveying it all – the tulle and white lights and yellow roses and crowded dance floor – with a look that suggests not so much boredom as a mix of fear and resignation. The sort of look one might expect on the face of a death row inmate whose appeals have all expired and who knows his date with destiny won’t be postponed this time.
I feel myself stiffen, drawing away without letting go.
“I’m sorry, am I boring you?”
I fail in my efforts to make the comment sound light and flippant, and the bitter sarcasm rings more loudly than I expected.
Your right hand loosens its hold on my waist, and the fingers of your left hand free themselves from our intertwined grip. You’re still touching me, but barely, and you answer me with only a shrug.
Your feet and hips are still moving, and I know I should let it go and just keep dancing. But I can’t seem to stop the words from coming out of my mouth.
“No, really, do you not want to be here? Because we could leave. I mean, Sheila’s only one of my best friends and I’m only one of the bridesmaids. It’s not really that big of a day, is it? It’s just a wedding.”
The bitter venom with which I spit out that final word makes Sheila’s elderly aunt and uncle, dancing next to us, turn their heads our way. They politely avert their gazes as you let your right hand fall from my waist and deliberately remove your left from what remains of our contact.
You turn on one heel and stride across the dance floor towards the exit.
I follow, ignoring the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that resembles the tension I always feel going up the first hill on the old wooden rollercoaster at the PNE. Ignoring the voice that says not to ask. Not to start a fight.
Though it isn’t a fight really, is it?
A fight would imply that voices are raised, points of view are exchanged, arguments are made on one side, then another.
Not that one person – me – does all the talking, throwing out a series of questions.
What’s wrong. Why are you being like this. Do you not want to be here.
Not that the other person – you – dodges all the questions, pleading a headache, a dislike of crowds and loud music, a need to get some air.
I avoid pointing out that your Saturday nights out with the hockey guys are almost always spent in bars where music is surely played louder than the DJ’s understated, approved-by-mother-of-the-groom volume.
I avoid reminding you that it’s my friend’s wedding and I look beautiful and we should be in there, wrapped around each other on the dance floor, enjoying the romance of it all.
I ignore the little voice that says it isn’t the first time you’ve seemed distant. Aloof. As if you wanted to be anywhere but with me.
I stroke your forehead instead, smoothing the furrow in your brow, murmuring soothing words about hanging in there, making an effort to enjoy it for Sheila’s sake.
I make sure we’re on the patio when the bouquet and garter are tossed. I wonder if you see the kiss Tim gives Karen after she makes a flying leap to catch the bouquet. But I don’t ask.
When you drop me off at my front door at the end of the night, you yawn and say you need your sleep because you have an early morning practice.
I don’t ask you in.
*
June.
The spring breeze is ruffling your hair as you loll back on the grey flannel blanket, popping another olive into your mouth before taking a slow and deliberate sip from your glass of wine.
You’re staring off over the river, attention focused on a tugboat towing a log boom slowly past. The sun dances on the water’s surface – the Fraser is in one of its merry moods today, its depths an ever-shifting palette of blues and silvers.
I’m shivering, though, feeling the chill bite of the wind off the water, and I can’t find a comfortable spot on the blanket. A rock digs into my tailbone as I wiggle into a cross-legged pose.
I wasn’t supposed to be having this conversation. I thought the moment I mentioned the wedding, you’d be asking which tie you should wear. Not avoiding my gaze when I asked, playfully, if you’d mind if I caught the bouquet. Not making lame excuses about having stuff to do on a Saturday afternoon in August and maybe being too busy to come.
“What do you mean you’re busy?”
I try for a light, inquisitive tone but the result is strident and whiny. You don’t say anything, and I hear my words tumble over themselves as I race on.
“It’s a wedding, Mark. Sheila’s wedding. Sheila! She was my first friend in B.C. She saved me from dying of loneliness that first winter out here. I’m one of her bridesmaids, for heaven’s sakes. How can you be too busy for her wedding?”
There’s a long, heavy silence as you continue to follow the tugboat’s progress with fascination.
I allow the moment to grow until it feels like the longest pause in the history of human dialogue. Finally I accept that you have no intention of speaking, and I push aside the little voice that’s telling me not to beg.
I reach out and stroke your cheek.
“Please, Mark, will you come? For me?”
Sweetness and pleading don’t come naturally to me, and my tone sounds forced. But I see a smile start to play at the corners of your mouth. Then you turn back to face me and shrug in an open-armed, palms-up gesture of surrender.
You roll your green eyes at me, but you’ve given in to the smile.
When you lean forward to kiss me, it’s not hard to smile back.
*
April.
You sprawl there on the floor, lying back against the squashy green velvet cushions that have travelled with my boxes of belongings from my parents’ basement to here. My first real place – though you often laugh at the descriptor, pointing out that my bedroom window overlooks the tawdry 12th Street stroll and that the heavy chenille drapes on my balcony door obscure an excellent view of the bins where dumpster divers scrounge in the alley.
I don’t care. It’s my space and no one shares it. Except you.
I can hardly remember a Wednesday before you. Before your lazy smile and long legs and faded blue jeans became a part of the backdrop of my otherwise beige living room.
Funny that Wednesday is always our day. Remember? It started the day you called me at work and said you had to see me that week, suggesting a Wednesday get-together. I pushed aside the feeling that Wednesday was somehow a second-best sort of date night. That in picking it you were leaving your Fridays and Saturdays free for other things.
I never asked what other things. It never mattered after that first week. You said it was the perfect day to see me because, with Wednesday to look forward to, the week didn’t seem as long.
Now it’s a ritual. You arrive after work, ring the buzzer twice, race up the stairs with a bag of takeout and a rental DVD and fling yourself onto my cushions on the floor.
Today it’s lamb vindaloo and butter chicken from the Royal Tandoori Buffet. With a Mel Gibson double-feature for later: Maverick and Braveheart.
I curl up beside you, propped up on one elbow, nibbling at the chicken as I watch you plow enthusiastically into the vindaloo.
I’m smiling. One of those big stupid goofy smiles that I can’t control no matter how hard I try. It’s looking at you that does it. Sprawled there with a dollop of red sauce on your chin, copper curls tousled against the pillows, the freckles whose existence you try to deny a gentle spray of sunshine across your cheeks and nose.
I watch as my hand reaches out and strokes your face, obeying a compulsion that I no longer question. My fingers know every millimetre of this journey. The softness of your cheek, the roughness of the stubble along your jawline, the small bump in your nose where it was broken in a peewee hockey game nineteen years ago.
Your face softens, as it always does, the sharply etched features taking on the blurred outlines of a watercolour painting. The furrow in your forehead smooths. The tiny lines that radiate from the corners of your eyes dissipate as those eyes begin to close, lids at half-mast over the green pools of laughter beneath.
You chuckle slightly, the sound a deep purr in the back of your throat.
But you say nothing as my hand continues its journey, through your curls, down your neck, across your chest to the buttons on the crisp white shirt. One by one the buttons open, the cotton falling softly aside as my fingers wend their way towards the silver buckle on your belt.
Then your hand wanders to my neck, soft and cool as silk against the warmth of my skin, and your fingers trace a slow and gentle path down my spine to my tailbone.
We don’t finish the vindaloo. And we don’t watch the movies.
*
January.
I am cold and more than a little cranky as I perch on the hard bench at the edge of the arena and lace up the not-quite-white rental skates. I don’t want to be here.
It’s Karen’s fault. She got it into their heads that we should all head to Burnaby 8Rinks for the public skate this grey Sunday afternoon.
Heedless of my protests that my utter inability to skate was one of the motivating forces that made me move to the only place in Canada without outdoor rinks, Karen
insisted it would be a fun girls’ outing.
That a particular dark-haired, hockey-playing co-worker of hers just happened to be finishing up a practice on one of the other rinks as we were heading in for the public skate was, she insisted with a look of serene innocence, purely coincidental. That said co-worker called over to a few of his buddies and suggested they stick around for the public skate was equally unplanned on her part.
“Whatever,” I muttered at her, my attempt to vociferate objections drowned out by the giggles of the others, who insisted that having the men around would be fun.
Well and good for Sheila, who – courtesy of the sparkling diamond Robert gave her for Christmas – couldn’t care less what men think of her. And for Paula, who can actually skate. And for Karen, who can’t – but with saucy blonde curls and big blue eyes atop her tiny, perfectly proportioned frame, it isn’t often necessary for Karen to be good at anything. She just shows up, and everything else revolves around her.
Case in point: Moments ago, Karen put one tentative toe onto the ice, stumbled, and immediately found herself in the protective custody of Tim, the dark-haired co-worker, and some friend of his with the approximate build and hirsuteness of a gorilla.
So that leaves me. Alone on the hard cold bench, lacing up the ugly, uncomfortable skates.
I’m not about to skate, however. When it comes to attracting knights on shining blades, my mousy-brown locks don’t have the same drawing power as Karen’s sunshiny halo.
I decide to procrastinate by heading out to the vending machines in the hall. Though it means clumping awkwardly through a group of giggling teenage girls of the shining-haired, bare-midriffed variety (the kind of girls who made me uncomfortable when I was their age and who seem only marginally less intimidating at a distance of more than a decade), I figure the prospect of running the cheerleader gauntlet is less daunting than hitting the ice.
I crack open my Diet Coke – something in me still believes that I really will shed those ten pounds off my hips if only I never have the full-sugar variety – and turn to head back in to the bench.
When, in far less time than it takes to describe it, the following happens:
One giggling bare-midriffed girl nudges another as a tall, red-haired hockey player, resplendent in sweaty jersey, emerges from one of the rinks.
Second bare-midriffed girl turns to throw a dazzling smile at aforementioned hockey player, reaching out a hand to push shining chestnut tresses off her face. Not to be outdone, first bare-midriffed girl whirls to flash her own pearly whites.
Causing pink scarf to get caught in outstretched hand of second girl.
Who, caught in mid-pivot, stumbles into the path of red-haired hockey player.
Who, caught in mid-stride, starts to lose his balance, flinging his arms out to either side in a desperate attempt to avoid falling on either bare-midriffed girl.
And sends my newly opened Diet Coke flying – catching me, him and both bare-midriffed girls in a shower of cold brown stickiness.
“Watch it!” squeals one, in almost perfect stereo with the other’s “Dude, look out!”
They scatter with their friends in the general direction of the ladies’ washroom.
Leaving the tall, red-haired hockey player staring at me with sheepish green eyes.
The warm, throaty baritone that issues an apology for his clumsiness sends a zing running through my body, shooting electric warmth into my cold fingers and cranky toes. When the voice offers to buy me another, I start to say no. Then yes.
Then I grin up instead.
“No need,” I say, surprised by the confidence I hear in my laughing tone. “But I’ll take a skating lesson as payment, if you’d like.”
You stare for a moment, then the green eyes light with laughter, and you reach out a hand to lead me back to the rink.
Turns out skating’s pretty fun, actually.
*
There. It’s done. I told it backwards.
You haven’t walked away from the dance floor at Sheila’s wedding. I haven’t stood crying in my living room on a rainy afternoon and begged you not to leave.
You’re just coming over now. You’ll teach me to skate. We’ll watch videos and eat Wednesday takeout and curl up on the squashy cushions on my floor while my fingers trace the outlines of your face. It’s all just beginning now.
Will my heart be any less broken when it ends this time?
I wonder.
Green Smarties
A wee piece I wrote for the Sunday afternoon writers ...
*
Green Smarties
She prefers green Smarties, she’s afraid of cats and she’s in love with Colin Firth.
These, she thinks, are the essential facts.
She shifts her hips, trying to edge as far away from the lolling head of the snoring man beside her as the confined space of seat 32B will allow.
Yes, she decides – thanking her lucky stars that at least her short legs allow her some space to wriggle, even in steerage class – these are the only real truths she needs to hold onto.
Oh, there’s plenty of other stuff to know, in this fill-in-the-blank, stick-on-a-label world.
Name: Alison Jane Tennant
Age: 23
Sign: Virgo
She mistrusts such facts, their black-and-white smugness, their stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the world is a rainbow of shades of grey.
They tell you nothing anyway, these so-called facts.
They don’t tell you she hates the name Alison and much prefers to go by Jane.
They don’t tell you she scoffs at horoscopes and the idea of a destiny written in the stars (yes, she is shy, nitpicky and somewhat bossy, traits they tell her are written into her zodiac sign, but she chooses to blame her mother’s genes).
Facts say little about how she ended up here.
She can write the story so quickly in her mind when it’s just the facts.
Alison meets Neil. Alison says “I love you.” Neil says it back. Alison and Neil are happy together. Neil moves in to Alison’s apartment. Alison comes home early one day. Alison meets Rebecca. Rebecca is in Neil’s bed. Neil and Rebecca are naked.
Alison leaves.
Facts, Jane thinks, don’t tell the story at all.
Fact: She loved to look at him.
Facts don’t reveal the sense of awe that crept over her when she stared at him, her wonderment at the perfection of the blue eyes and the flashing smile that had turned so surprisingly her way. She’d often tease him he was almost as cute as Colin, but she knew there was no comparison. She wouldn’t have even noticed Colin if Neil was in the room.
Fact: She loved to hold him.
Facts don’t cover the way he filled her with that enveloping warmth, the glow that started deep down in her core and slowly expanded to fill every part of her, every inch of muscle and bone and skin.
Fact: She loved to surprise him.
Facts don’t do justice to the moment when she walked in the door, already smiling at the thought of the “ta-da” that she’d use to announce her early arrival home from work.
She heard the female giggle as she crossed the floor to the closed bedroom door, not even registering the noise until she turned the handle.
Then she watched it happen, feeling curiously detached, as though somehow her own presence wasn’t part of the scene unfolding in front of her.
The sudden swish of a mane of red-brown hair – hair, Alison noted, that was just the colour she’d always wanted her own sandy locks to be. The flash of a long sleek tanned leg as a slim brown pair of feet landed on the floor, their owner hastily wrapping herself in a robe – Alison’s robe, she noted with something approaching amusement; the green one Neil had given her for Christmas.
Neil. Sitting abruptly upright. Not even pulling the covers over him to hide his nakedness.
“Alison …” he began.
“Do us both a favour,” she heard herself say in an oddly cool voice. “Don’t even say it. There’s nothing to explain.”
She felt the corners of her lips turn up in a smile, the automatic response forming on her face as she turned to the intruder.
“I’m Alison,” she said in the same cool voice. “I used to live here.”
Those facts don’t reveal the hard knot that started in her chest at that moment, the cracking, splintering feeling that threatened to tear her in two and left her frangible, as though the faintest puff of a baby’s breath might shatter all that was left of what used to be Alison.
It was Jane who caught the flight to England.
*
He sorts his Smarties by colour, he’s allergic to cats and he’s always had a thing for American accents.
These, Nigel thinks as he stares at the bottom of his empty pint glass, are the kind of frivolous truths about himself he never shares with anybody.
No one wants to hear that sort of thing when they could be discussing the purchase of his new flat in Islington or the fate of Arsenal at the weekend or how he manages to balance his job in the City with his pub nights with the lads and his picture-perfect relationship with the woman Harry always calls “the wondrous Miranda.”
Miranda.
He could never help the smile that crept into his voice when he said the word, the tiny note of pride he tried hard to suppress whenever the approving nods and back-slaps came from the others. He remembers every moment of the night she’d walked into the pub.
It wasn’t just his attention she’d caught.
Dark hair in a mane down her back, swinging slightly as she walked. Tall. Slender. Dressed in a trim, tailored grey suit that even Nigel could tell hadn’t come off the rack at H&M. A suit sufficiently conservative as to find favour with the number-crunchers in the City but with the skirt skimming just snug enough over trim buttocks to suggest there was plenty waiting to be discovered underneath.
Model? Actress? No, television presenter, they decided as their heads all swivelled in unison to follow her progress across the smoky room – a Wimbledon audience with their focus on only one player.
They’d all watched her.
But it had fallen to Nigel to go speak to her when Harry – in his usual booming fashion – announced to the table at large that it was time for Nigel to get over his moping over Emma and move on to finer things.
“Don’t get much finer than that one, do they, mate?” the red-haired drinker said with a theatrical leer, nudging Nigel so hard his Caffrey’s sloshed over the edge of the pint glass.
Nigel stared over at the dark-haired, grey-suited embodiment of feminine perfection and raised an eyebrow at Harry.
“I’m not in her league, old chap.” Nigel mocked Harry’s public-school voice with his own best I could-have-gone-to-Eton-too-I-just-chose-not-to accent. “In fact, I venture to suggest that I am not even a spectator on the field at the match she’s playing in.”
Harry punched him, sloshing more dark beer onto the tabletop.
“As my dear departed grandmother was wont to say, piffle.” Harry gestured at Nigel, waving his hand up and down in front of him as a television presenter might in front of a game show prize. “You’re successful, you’re wearing a tie and you’re not entirely repulsive to those of the female persuasion. I say you’re going to introduce yourself to her, and if you don’t come back with her number I’ll buy you a pint.”
Whether the first two pints had given him an unusual streak of bravery or the prospect of seeing Harry part willingly with four pounds fifty of his own unearned fortune motivated his feet to move despite himself, Nigel couldn’t have said.
But he went.
And found himself on the receiving end of a slow, inviting smile topped by a laughing pair of brown eyes.
“I hoped it would be you who came over,” she said. “I’m Miranda. Can I get you a drink?”
It was all so easy after that.
Even Harry had to express admiration for the speed with which the two became an item so accepted that soon you couldn’t say one name without the other. Nigel-and-Miranda. Miranda-and-Nigel.
Even Harry had to appreciate the ease with which Miranda invited herself into all their lives, stopping by the pub on Thursdays just long enough to ask after Graham’s football exploits, challenge Steve to a round of darts and indulge in a witty echange of extravagant compliments with Harry before making her way home. She always kissed Nigel with just the right mix of teasing promise and public decorum, telling him to stay as late as he liked, she’d be waiting up.
He was never late.
And she was always waiting up, wearing “some old thing” she claimed to have dragged out of her bottom drawer, deliberately leaving the boxes from Agent Provocateur out in plain sight.
In fact, he contemplates as he stares at the still-empty bottom of his pint glass, he hadn’t seen so much black lace and satin in his entire twenty-eight years of life as he had in the eight months that followed his fateful walk across the pub to introduce himself to a vision in a tailored grey suit.
Harry wasn’t wrong, he thinks. Miranda is wondrous.
So how, he asks himself, almost aloud, has he ended up here?
*
Here. She’s been here two months. She’s crossed each twenty-four-hour chunk of time meticulously off on her calendar, recorded in her journal the mundanities of sixty-one days of existence on this still unfamiliar continent. Or, at least, the first twenty-one of them. After three weeks she realized there was little in her journal but a record of the same day repeated over and over again. Same weather (rain). Same food (beef-and-kindey pie, fish and chips, butter chicken from the Indian takeaway). Same commute to work (Northern Line tube to Leicester Square). Same day at the Irish Shop in Covent Garden (fold Aran sweaters, dust Belleek china, sell Waterford crystal to rich American tourists).
She still feels so new to this street, this grey unprepossessing place of crumbling brick houses and wrought-iron fences and cold damp basement flats, that she’s convinced the passersby can still smell the maple syrup that runs through her veins.
Her address still feels foreign to her when she writes it, slowly and neatly, on the back of the envelope she’s about to send off to Carmen.
66 St. Augustine’s Rd., Camden Town, London, U.K., NW1
She gets an odd satsifaction from seeing the words unfold across the page in blue, feeling that they ground her somehow, that they make her world real. The words should help to impress upon Carmen that she was serious about this move. That she wasn’t, as Carmen accused her, just running away from heartbreak over Neil.
“Neil who?” she’d said lightly the last time Carmen levied the accusation at her. “I just want to travel to the land of Colin Firth.”
Jane smiles as she licks the envelope, ignoring the pang she feels at the thought that this is Thursday. She and Carmen should be curling up on her squashy old futon this evening with a bottle of wine for their weekly intake of Pride and Prejudice.
They always alternate turns with the remote, taking turns to fast-forward through the dull parts (who cares about the foolish eldest Bennett sister and her foppish rich boyfriend anyway) and pause-and-rewind-and-play-and-pause-again on the good parts (Mr. Darcy leaping into a pond and emerging with clinging white shirt is always good for at least a half-dozen takes – more if a second bottle of wine is being consumed).
Jane feels a catch in her throat and a slight burning sensation in her eyes that she chooses to attribute to the dust in her flat. She smooths the flap of the envelope and stands up, pushing the hard wooden chair as far under the table as it will go so she can make space in the tiny galley kitchen for someone to walk through.
Not that anyone walks here but her.
She realizes, as she hurries down the street to the red mailbox – postbox, she corrects herself mentally – that there’s something depressing about that fact. That in two full months she has yet to meet a person she knows well enough to invite them over.
The obligatory post-work pints with her co-workers on Fridays always end early, when each of the women traipses off home to husband and children and the token man heads out to meet his partner for an evening at the opera or the theatre.
Then she just seeks shelter in her flat, curled up with butter chicken or fish and chips – depending which takeaway she’s stopped at on the way home from the tube station – and reading. Or writing enthusiastic letters to Carmen about how exciting London is. How vibrant. How busy. How full of culture and life and sights and experiences.
All of which is true, she consoles herself whenever a pang of guilt hits her for not being honest with her oldest, truest, closest friend. London is vibrant and busy and full of culture and life and sights and eperiences. Just because she hasn’t had any experiences yet doesn’t mean she can’t.
It’s that thought that makes her stop in the street as she starts to turn to head back to her flat.
Her eyes fall on the Lamb’s Head the end of the street. Two months here and she hasn’t even gone in for a pint. Carmen would be horrified.
The thought of describing for Carmen an evening in a real British pub is enough to drive Jane over the threshold and into its dark, smoky interior.
It’s not the most promising start to an exciting London social life, she thinks, her eyes taking in the ragtag assortment of drinkers at the various scuffed tables. Who should she approach first: the two pimply-faced boys who don’t look old enough to drink, the solitary man who’s hunched over a pint glass staring so intently at it that he looks almost asleep, or the table of pensioners complaining loudly about the weather and the fortunes of something called Arsenal, which she suspects is a soccer team – football, she adjusts quickly.
Jane straightens her shoulders and marches to the bar with what she hopes is the confident stride of someone who’s accustomed to such things.
“Whaddya fancy?”
The spike-haired, nose-ringed bartender turns a questioning gaze on Jane.
“Um …” Jane realizes her attempt to appear like an old hat at this ordering pints thing would be helped by having even the faintest clue about British beer.
She stares back at the bartender, feeling foolish.
The bartender winks and grins. “Been a hard day, has it? Pint of the best, then?”
Jane finds her voice.
“Depends what you call the best.” She attempts what she hopes is a grin but fears it may look more like a grimace. “I really can’t stand beer, actually.”
The bartender raises his eyebrows at Jane, but he doesn’t have a chance to speak before a new voice enters the conversation.
“Then you’re drinking the wrong beer.”
Jane turns at the sound of a warm baritone with a Colin Firth accent and is surprised to find the solitary, pint-glass-gazing man watching her from his perch at the end of the bar. With, she can’t help but note, a pair of what seems at this distance to be green eyes regarding her with something approaching amusement underneath a headful of dark, slightly rumpled curls.
“You Americans just don’t know beer.”
Jane wants to be offended at the error, but she’s too distracted by the undone top button of the white shirt pint-glass man is wearing under a dark suit. Not to mention the slight humorous quirk at the corner of his mouth.
She shakes herself mentally.
“Canadian, actually.” She grins, and this time it doesn’t feel forced.
He smacks his forehead playfully with the palm of one hand, and his mouth quirks again.
“Ah, from the colonies.”
She’d try to work up the energy to be offended, but the man has by now gotten off his stool and come over to sit beside her.
All Jane can do is keep grinning, afraid she looks foolish but not able to do anytthing about it.
“She’ll have a Caffery’s,” he tells the bartender. “On me.”
To Jane, he proffers a smile and an outstretched hand. (A large, strong-looking hand, despite the paleness of his skin, Jane notes. Not that she’s easily distracted.)
“Welcome, oh visitor from the colonies. I’m Nigel.”
Jane takes his hand, hoping her hand isn’t quivering as she shakes his.
“I’m Jane.”
Where’s Carmen when you need her, she wonders. She’s never been good at small talk, and it promises to only be worse when the person small-talking with her happens to look and sound distractingly like Colin Firth’s somewhat younger and quite possibly even hotter brother.
Perhaps it’s the Caffery’s, but talking with Nigel turns out to be no problem at all.
Before the first pint is finished, Jane has managed to tell him that she’s twenty-three, that she hates cats (“afraid of” always sounds so bad, and first impressions are important), that she’s renting a dingy basement flat up the street and that she’s working enough hours in the Irish Shop to pay her bills and save up to backpack around the British Isles.
In return, she acquires the information that he is an only child, that he’s so allergic to cats that he breaks out in hives if he pets one, that he hates football but follows it because everyone else does, that he’s been to New York City once and that he much prefers American – “Canadian,” he corrects himself with the mouth quirk that’s already starting to mesmerize Jane – junk food.
“Take crisps,” he says, gesturing at the line of small packets behind the bar. “What do we have? Monstrous concoctions like beef and mustard and roast chicken – which, I may add, taste absolutely nothing like those two quite delightful dishes. You have marvellous flavours like ketchup and salt-and-vinegar and barbecue.”
The way his mouth rolls around the word ‘barbecue’ makes Jane grin.
“You have better chocolate, though,” she says, patting his hand lightly in what she hopes is read as a playfully consoling gesture. “You know those Cadbury’s bars they sell in the machines in the tube stations for 30 pence? Do you know how many of those I’ve eaten in the past two months?”
Nigel puts a finger on his chin and nods in mock pensiveness.
“Ah, yes, Cadbury’s. But then, you have Smarties. The proper Smarties, I mean. Not ours, which don’t taste the same at all.”
He curls up his mouth and nose in an expression that makes Jane giggle, even while something goes quivery inside her.
“You like Smarties? Smarties are my all-time favourite candy.”
Nigel nods with such vigor that his curls bounce.
“Who couldn’t love a candy you can sort by colour?” He looks so childishly pleased with the thought that Jane giggles again. Then he lowers his voice to a confiding whisper and touches Jane lightly on the arm with one hand. “I always eat the green ones last, because they’re my favourites. But don’t tell anyone. I know it ought to be the red ones.”
Jane feels the warmth of his hand on her arm and realizes that he isn’t moving it away. He’s leaning in so close that she can see the grey flecks in his green eyes and make out the faintest streak of silver at the temples of his dark hair. She sees one curl flopping over his forehead and feels the temptation to reach out towards it and push it away from his face. Is his hair as soft as it looks, she wonders.
It’s fate, she thinks. It must be. What else brought her in here to talk to some guy who looks like Colin Firth, is horrifically allergic to all things feline and turns out to share her penchant for green Smarties? A guy who at this moment has his hand on her arm and is giving her a look that suggests he wouldn’t push her hand away if she did reach for that unruly curl.
She sits still, almost not daring to breathe as she searches her brain for a response that won’t use the words ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ – she doesn’t know much about British men, but she’s reasonably certain they wouldn’t be any more comfortable than their Canadian counterparts with the use of such phrases before they’ve even asked you on a date.
A date. Just think, she could even end up with a date. She might have some genuine, honest-to-gooness British male encounter to write Carmen about. Maybe he’ll even come over to her flat. She could cook him something Canadian. What’s Canadian, she wonders. Maybe hamburgers? No, that’s silly, who’d cook hamburgers for a romantic evening. Carmen would have an idea. Maybe she should –
“Nigel!”
Jane’s musings are brought to an abrupt halt by a booming voice that makes every head in the pub turn. A red-haired man strides across the pub, claps a hand on Nigel’s shoulder.
“Here so early? Where’s the wondrous Miranda?”
Nigel’s glance flicks from Jane to the red-haired man and back to Jane again.
Jane stands abruptly.
“Don’t let me keep you,” she says, pleased to hear that her voice sounds casual and unconcerned. “Thanks for the pint.”
As she turns to leave, she sees Nigel lift his hand as though he is about to touch her.
She doesn’t pause, and Nigel doesn’t say anything else.
To be fair, Jane thinks as she leaves the pub, he didn’t have a chance to say much. The red-haired man had already launched into a stream of conversation – all to do, as far as Jane can tell, with “the wondrous Miranda.”
Not that Jane feels like being fair.
What the hell was he doing flirting with her if he’s involved with someone called the Wondrous Miranda? And what the hell was she doing even for a moment believing in fate?
At least, Jane thinks, it’s good to know that British guys are just as much jackasses as Canadian ones.
She finds the thought oddly cheering, and she quickens her pace to hurry back to the flat.
****
“Nigel, old chap, you are a prize idiot.”
He mutters it to himself out loud, feeling strangely cheered by defining the situation in such black-and-white terms. It’s not that he’s trying to figure out a way to piece his heart back together. It’s not that he’s fallen victim to unfortunate timing and the loud mouth of the world’s most tactless friend. And it’s not that he’s pinning his hopes on this mission to track down one American – Canadian, he mentally adjusts – shopgirl amidst the throngs of tourists in Covent Garden.
No, it’s merely that he’s a prize idiot.
That fact having been satisfactorily defined, Nigel stops to look in the window of yet another shop, where yet another attractive shopgirl is folding clothes and shelving them neatly. She glances up and smiles as she catches Nigel’s eye through the window, and Nigel smiles halfheartedly back. Tall, blonde, immpeccably dressed and flawlessly made up – not remotely like the girl he’s searching for, with her tousled sandy hair and shy smile and the jeans-and-white-shirt look he’s always found so appealing.
She’d made him laugh. At what, he isn’t entirely sure. He just knew that he felt better talking to her than he had in weeks. Which was what had driven him to Covent Garden on a foolish mission to find one shop girl in this maze of streets and stalls.
Nigel turns and trudges on, promising himself that he’ll only walk to end of this street. After that, he’ll head home.
Alone. To an empty flat.
Nigel pushes the thoughts away and pauses to look in the next window.
And stops in something approaching astonishment as he sees the small, sandy-haired figure neatly folding Aran sweaters and returning them to the shelf.
He squares his shoulders and pushes open the shop door.
She turns as the jingle of a bell announces his arrival, and Nigel can see she’s about to speak – probably, he figures, to politely tell him that it’s closing time and that he should move along.
Then her face changes, and Nigel watches a smile start to form before flickering off nearly as quickly as it began.
“Hullo,” he says. (Great opening line, Nigel, he berates himself. Way to really make an impression.)
“Hello,” she says back, her soft accented voice sounding unsure of the level of warmth with which she should infuse her greeting.
He wonders if he should pretend he just happened to wander in, buy a Waterford vase for his grandmother and engage her in small talk long enough to assure her that all things weren’t really what they appeared to be.
“I came looking for you,” is what he says instead. “I’m glad I tracked you down.”
“You found me,” she replies lightly, still not quite smiling and not taking any steps to move closer to him. But there’s enough warmth in her expression that Nigel feels encouraged to continue.
“In the pub the other night –“ he starts, then tries a new tack. “The thing is …”
He hears his voice trail off helplessly.
Good job, Nigel, way to impress her with your stellar conversational ability.
“Don’t worry about it.” She shrugs and waves a hand casually, as though batting away a small insect. “It was nice to meet you. And I appreciate you buying me the pint.”
She turns back to the sweaters, although as far as Nigel can see everything’s folded so neatly that there’s nothing left for her to do. Her small shoulders are stiff, and something about the tight posture of the thin back suggests she’s getting ready to ask him to leave.
“The thing is, I’m not with Miranda anymore.”
The words are out almost before Nigel can register that he’s even planned to say them. But he’s relieved to see her turn around and regard him warily.
She doesn’t say anything, and Nigel plunges on.
“Harry’s a great bloke, but he has a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. That night I met you, I was going to explain to the lads about Miranda. That it was over.”
Nigel realizes with some surprise that this may, in fact, be the first time he’s defined that particular truth aloud.
“It’s been over for ages, actually. I could never tell them. They all loved Miranda. She was –“
“Wondrous,” Jane supplies drily, but with a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.
Nigel is surprised to find himself laughing.
“Indeed. Wondrous,” he said. “She was wondrous, and it was –“
He pulls himself up short.
“Well, it just was. But it’s not anymore, and I had a great time meeting you, and the thing is –“
Nigel digs into his pocket.
“I wanted to bring you these.”
He holds out the small box, and Jane laughs then.
“Smarties? You came all the way here to bring me Smarties?”
“They’re the false British kind, I’m afraid. But they’re the best we can do.”
He hears the ‘we’ and feels heat creeping across his face, cursing the pale English skin that allows him to still manage to blush like a teenage girl.
Jane grins and takes the proffered box.
“In that case, kind sir, I’ll take them. Shall we go somewhere to sort them and eat the green ones last?”
Sometimes, Nigel thinks, it really is that easy.
*
Sometimes, Jane thinks, it really is that idiotic.
That ridiciously, stupidly, senselessly idiotic.
She watches him walk out the door of the pub, unable to stop admiring the broad back and well-formed ass even while knowing full well that every step said back and ass made away from her was one step farther away from any hope that fate really was on her side.
Serves me right, she reprimands herself, for being so stupid as to write Carmen that long letter telling her all about it.
And it’s just so incredible, the scrawled words had gushed across the page.
Funny thing, at first I was just attracted to him because he was so, well, Colin-Firth-like. Now I don’t think he looks anything like Colin – although I do think they sound the same, even though Nigel insists his accent is very middle-class and not posh at all.
But the more time we spend together, the more I realize how funny and sweet he is, and what a genuinely nice guy he is.
Whenever we go out we end up talking for hours and hours. I think he knows more about me by now than anyone – except of course you! I even told him about Neil. I never thought I’d tell anyone about Neil.
It was easy to tell him. It kind of helped, I guess, that he’s been getting over someone too. Mind you, his wasn’t a drama. He say it was just waking up one morning and suddenly realizing that this perfect life he was building with this perfect person wasn’t what he wanted at all. That he saw a future with big job, big money, big house, two children and no real himself in it anywhere.
He was so dazzled by how perfect she was, he says, that he didn’t stop to think for months that he wasn’t happy. That he was always worried about what to wear, what to say, what to do, how to behave, and never thinking about whether he even wanted to be there.
She didn’t even cry when he told her it was over. Can you believe that? Think of all the tears I spilled over Neil.
And, if I’m honest, think of all the tears I’d spill if Nigel walked up to me even now and said it was over.
And she had to go and write that why, exactly? Jane sits at the scuffed table, realizing that the promised tears are indeed ready to spill into the half-drunk pint of Cafferty’s.
It was all so stupid, anyway. So foolish and stupid that she’d laugh if she wasn’t so ready to cry.
It was Elsbeth’s fault, really.
She and Elsbeth were closing up together, and Jane was watching for Nigel as she finished putting the sweaters away, keeping one eye on the street outside and one on making sure all the sizes got put back in the right place.
“Waiting for that fine new bit of yours, are you?” Elsbeth teased her. “Nice work on that front. Nothing like shagging a fanciable fellow like Nigel to pay back that Neil, right? And he works in the City. Wait until Neil hears you’ve got a rich and gorgeous bloke. He’ll be crawling back to you crying before you know it.”
I don’t want him to crawl back to me, Jane wanted to say.
But she didn’t. Because, of course, Nigel chose that precise moment to walk up.
So she made no reply at all, just shot a glare at Elsbeth and reached up to kiss Nigel.
Who offered her a polite peck and then drew back.
Nigel didn’t reach for her hand or slide his arm around her shoulders as they strolled towards the tube station. And he didn’t make any comment when she reached out to squeeze him around the waist. Or when she snuggled up to him in the crowded tube car and joked that for a change she would enjoy getting squashed up against the person next to her.
In fact, Nigel didn’t say anything at all the entire journey to Camden Town.
He didn’t utter so much as a syllable until they’d sat down at the corner table in the Lamb’s Head with their pints of Caffery’s.
Then, as Jane stared at him with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, he finally spoke.
“So that’s what I am, is it? Just some fanciable bloke with money you can shag to make Neil jealous?”
Jane was wordless, unsure whether to be angry or hurt or to laugh at the whole stupid situation.
“So that is it, then.” Nigel’s voice was quiet and calm, but with an edge Jane hadn’t heard in it before. “That’s all this has been to you. Just a chance to shag some British bloke so you can call up your friend and tell her all about it and she can help you make Neil jealous. I hope it’s worked well for you.”
“Nigel …” Even to Jane’s own ears, her voice sounded faint. “Nigel, that’s not – it’s not – you’re not … I mean …”
She couldn’t make words. Wasn’t entirely sure at that moment how to string syllables together into something that even remotely resembled a sentence.
“Don’t bother, Jane. I’m not always quick, but I’m not stupid either.”
Nigel took a ten-pound note from his wallet and dropped it on the table.
And Jane, still wordless, still frozen to her chair, incapable of either movement or speech, could do nothing but watch him walk away.
****
No.
She’s not sitting here watching this. She is not letting him walk away like that without even saying a word.
She shoves aside her chair. sets down the half-drunk pint so quickly that Caffery’s sloshes onto the table, and dashes out into the street.
It’s only been a few minutes, hasn’t it? He can’t have gotten far, can he?
She looks up and down the street but sees no sign of him. Wonders if she should start to run in the direction of the tube station, if she could catch him before he crossed the barriers and descended into the Northern Line again.
But he’s so much taller. And faster. Chances are she’ll miss him. If that’s even where he’s gone.
Go home, she tells herself. You can call him later and talk about it. It’ll be okay.
She isn’t convinced. But she has no better idea.
So she turns her feet in the direction of her flat and walks slowly off.
“Jane!”
Her heart leaps for a moment but falls when she realizes it’s not Nigel’s voice. It’s probably not even directed at her. Think how many Janes there must be in the world.
Then she jumps as a hand clasps her shoulder.
lt’s Harry, face nearly as red as his hair, apparently from the exertion of having actually hurried to catch up with her.
“Glad I caught you, Jane. Heading home so early?”
Jane nods mutely, not wanting to be drawn into conversation with the ebullient Harry at this of all moments.
“Nonsense. You’re coming in for a drink. Graham and Steve will be here before you know it, and Nigel’s here already, I take it?”
“No, he’s –“
Jane tries to protest, but Harry is tugging at her arm so violently that it almost hurts, and she’s afraid of trying to launch into an explanation in the street and ending up in tears.
So she follows, meekly enough, and keeps her head down as Harry nudges her into a seat at the corner table she’d just vacated and heads to the bar.
She stares down at the table, tracing patterns in the scuff marks with one listless finger, as she waits for the return of Harry and tries to come up with the words to form an explanation for Nigel’s absence.
Then something falls onto the table with a light plink. Something small and purple.
Followed by a few dozen more small colourful objects cascading across the table’s scuffed surface.
And a man’s hand, holding up one small green Smartie.
She looks up and meets a pair of grey-flecked green eyes.
“I’m an idiot.”
Nigel smiles, and she’s smiling back without conscious thought.
“I knew I was an idiot the moment I walked away, and I was just about to come back when I ran into Harry. He promised to keep you here long enough for me to run to the shop for these.”
He reaches his hand towards Jane’s face, and she opens her lips, capturing the Smartie on her tongue.
She savours it slowly, sucking off the sweet coating and feeling the chocolate melt away on her tongue.
Then she folds her arms across her chest and levels what she hopes is a stern gaze at Nigel.
“This doesn’t mean you’re forgiven.”
He hangs his head, putting on a penitent-schoolboy face that very nearly makes her laugh. But she sets her lips in a tight frown.
“Don’t you ever, ever, do that to me again. You know I’m so glad I met you and I care about you desperately and if you ever walk away from me like that I might just cry.”
Jane’s cheeks blaze, and she knows she’s blushing. But she feels something inside her leap when she sees an answering pink on his own cheeks.
“Might?” He says softly, reaching out a hand and stroking her cheek. “If you ever walked away from me like that, I know I’d cry.”
She meets his gaze and sees something in the grey-green eyes that starts a warm feeling in her, a glow that starts deep down in her core and slowly expands to fill every part of her, every inch of muscle and bone and skin.
She turns her face up to kiss him.
And finds herself staring instead at three pint glasses being plunked onto the table with force.
“So, my little ones, have we made up?”
Harry is watching them both. Laughing and shaking his head with an expression that says, I know I’m playing gooseberry right now, and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.
He doesn’t wait for an answer. Just slides into the chair beside Jane and slings an arm carelessly around her shoulders.
“Well, my young colonial friend, tell me. Do you know any lovely Canadian girls who want to meet a handsome British fellow?”
Just wait till I write to Carmen, Jane thinks.
*
Green Smarties
She prefers green Smarties, she’s afraid of cats and she’s in love with Colin Firth.
These, she thinks, are the essential facts.
She shifts her hips, trying to edge as far away from the lolling head of the snoring man beside her as the confined space of seat 32B will allow.
Yes, she decides – thanking her lucky stars that at least her short legs allow her some space to wriggle, even in steerage class – these are the only real truths she needs to hold onto.
Oh, there’s plenty of other stuff to know, in this fill-in-the-blank, stick-on-a-label world.
Name: Alison Jane Tennant
Age: 23
Sign: Virgo
She mistrusts such facts, their black-and-white smugness, their stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the world is a rainbow of shades of grey.
They tell you nothing anyway, these so-called facts.
They don’t tell you she hates the name Alison and much prefers to go by Jane.
They don’t tell you she scoffs at horoscopes and the idea of a destiny written in the stars (yes, she is shy, nitpicky and somewhat bossy, traits they tell her are written into her zodiac sign, but she chooses to blame her mother’s genes).
Facts say little about how she ended up here.
She can write the story so quickly in her mind when it’s just the facts.
Alison meets Neil. Alison says “I love you.” Neil says it back. Alison and Neil are happy together. Neil moves in to Alison’s apartment. Alison comes home early one day. Alison meets Rebecca. Rebecca is in Neil’s bed. Neil and Rebecca are naked.
Alison leaves.
Facts, Jane thinks, don’t tell the story at all.
Fact: She loved to look at him.
Facts don’t reveal the sense of awe that crept over her when she stared at him, her wonderment at the perfection of the blue eyes and the flashing smile that had turned so surprisingly her way. She’d often tease him he was almost as cute as Colin, but she knew there was no comparison. She wouldn’t have even noticed Colin if Neil was in the room.
Fact: She loved to hold him.
Facts don’t cover the way he filled her with that enveloping warmth, the glow that started deep down in her core and slowly expanded to fill every part of her, every inch of muscle and bone and skin.
Fact: She loved to surprise him.
Facts don’t do justice to the moment when she walked in the door, already smiling at the thought of the “ta-da” that she’d use to announce her early arrival home from work.
She heard the female giggle as she crossed the floor to the closed bedroom door, not even registering the noise until she turned the handle.
Then she watched it happen, feeling curiously detached, as though somehow her own presence wasn’t part of the scene unfolding in front of her.
The sudden swish of a mane of red-brown hair – hair, Alison noted, that was just the colour she’d always wanted her own sandy locks to be. The flash of a long sleek tanned leg as a slim brown pair of feet landed on the floor, their owner hastily wrapping herself in a robe – Alison’s robe, she noted with something approaching amusement; the green one Neil had given her for Christmas.
Neil. Sitting abruptly upright. Not even pulling the covers over him to hide his nakedness.
“Alison …” he began.
“Do us both a favour,” she heard herself say in an oddly cool voice. “Don’t even say it. There’s nothing to explain.”
She felt the corners of her lips turn up in a smile, the automatic response forming on her face as she turned to the intruder.
“I’m Alison,” she said in the same cool voice. “I used to live here.”
Those facts don’t reveal the hard knot that started in her chest at that moment, the cracking, splintering feeling that threatened to tear her in two and left her frangible, as though the faintest puff of a baby’s breath might shatter all that was left of what used to be Alison.
It was Jane who caught the flight to England.
*
He sorts his Smarties by colour, he’s allergic to cats and he’s always had a thing for American accents.
These, Nigel thinks as he stares at the bottom of his empty pint glass, are the kind of frivolous truths about himself he never shares with anybody.
No one wants to hear that sort of thing when they could be discussing the purchase of his new flat in Islington or the fate of Arsenal at the weekend or how he manages to balance his job in the City with his pub nights with the lads and his picture-perfect relationship with the woman Harry always calls “the wondrous Miranda.”
Miranda.
He could never help the smile that crept into his voice when he said the word, the tiny note of pride he tried hard to suppress whenever the approving nods and back-slaps came from the others. He remembers every moment of the night she’d walked into the pub.
It wasn’t just his attention she’d caught.
Dark hair in a mane down her back, swinging slightly as she walked. Tall. Slender. Dressed in a trim, tailored grey suit that even Nigel could tell hadn’t come off the rack at H&M. A suit sufficiently conservative as to find favour with the number-crunchers in the City but with the skirt skimming just snug enough over trim buttocks to suggest there was plenty waiting to be discovered underneath.
Model? Actress? No, television presenter, they decided as their heads all swivelled in unison to follow her progress across the smoky room – a Wimbledon audience with their focus on only one player.
They’d all watched her.
But it had fallen to Nigel to go speak to her when Harry – in his usual booming fashion – announced to the table at large that it was time for Nigel to get over his moping over Emma and move on to finer things.
“Don’t get much finer than that one, do they, mate?” the red-haired drinker said with a theatrical leer, nudging Nigel so hard his Caffrey’s sloshed over the edge of the pint glass.
Nigel stared over at the dark-haired, grey-suited embodiment of feminine perfection and raised an eyebrow at Harry.
“I’m not in her league, old chap.” Nigel mocked Harry’s public-school voice with his own best I could-have-gone-to-Eton-too-I-just-chose-not-to accent. “In fact, I venture to suggest that I am not even a spectator on the field at the match she’s playing in.”
Harry punched him, sloshing more dark beer onto the tabletop.
“As my dear departed grandmother was wont to say, piffle.” Harry gestured at Nigel, waving his hand up and down in front of him as a television presenter might in front of a game show prize. “You’re successful, you’re wearing a tie and you’re not entirely repulsive to those of the female persuasion. I say you’re going to introduce yourself to her, and if you don’t come back with her number I’ll buy you a pint.”
Whether the first two pints had given him an unusual streak of bravery or the prospect of seeing Harry part willingly with four pounds fifty of his own unearned fortune motivated his feet to move despite himself, Nigel couldn’t have said.
But he went.
And found himself on the receiving end of a slow, inviting smile topped by a laughing pair of brown eyes.
“I hoped it would be you who came over,” she said. “I’m Miranda. Can I get you a drink?”
It was all so easy after that.
Even Harry had to express admiration for the speed with which the two became an item so accepted that soon you couldn’t say one name without the other. Nigel-and-Miranda. Miranda-and-Nigel.
Even Harry had to appreciate the ease with which Miranda invited herself into all their lives, stopping by the pub on Thursdays just long enough to ask after Graham’s football exploits, challenge Steve to a round of darts and indulge in a witty echange of extravagant compliments with Harry before making her way home. She always kissed Nigel with just the right mix of teasing promise and public decorum, telling him to stay as late as he liked, she’d be waiting up.
He was never late.
And she was always waiting up, wearing “some old thing” she claimed to have dragged out of her bottom drawer, deliberately leaving the boxes from Agent Provocateur out in plain sight.
In fact, he contemplates as he stares at the still-empty bottom of his pint glass, he hadn’t seen so much black lace and satin in his entire twenty-eight years of life as he had in the eight months that followed his fateful walk across the pub to introduce himself to a vision in a tailored grey suit.
Harry wasn’t wrong, he thinks. Miranda is wondrous.
So how, he asks himself, almost aloud, has he ended up here?
*
Here. She’s been here two months. She’s crossed each twenty-four-hour chunk of time meticulously off on her calendar, recorded in her journal the mundanities of sixty-one days of existence on this still unfamiliar continent. Or, at least, the first twenty-one of them. After three weeks she realized there was little in her journal but a record of the same day repeated over and over again. Same weather (rain). Same food (beef-and-kindey pie, fish and chips, butter chicken from the Indian takeaway). Same commute to work (Northern Line tube to Leicester Square). Same day at the Irish Shop in Covent Garden (fold Aran sweaters, dust Belleek china, sell Waterford crystal to rich American tourists).
She still feels so new to this street, this grey unprepossessing place of crumbling brick houses and wrought-iron fences and cold damp basement flats, that she’s convinced the passersby can still smell the maple syrup that runs through her veins.
Her address still feels foreign to her when she writes it, slowly and neatly, on the back of the envelope she’s about to send off to Carmen.
66 St. Augustine’s Rd., Camden Town, London, U.K., NW1
She gets an odd satsifaction from seeing the words unfold across the page in blue, feeling that they ground her somehow, that they make her world real. The words should help to impress upon Carmen that she was serious about this move. That she wasn’t, as Carmen accused her, just running away from heartbreak over Neil.
“Neil who?” she’d said lightly the last time Carmen levied the accusation at her. “I just want to travel to the land of Colin Firth.”
Jane smiles as she licks the envelope, ignoring the pang she feels at the thought that this is Thursday. She and Carmen should be curling up on her squashy old futon this evening with a bottle of wine for their weekly intake of Pride and Prejudice.
They always alternate turns with the remote, taking turns to fast-forward through the dull parts (who cares about the foolish eldest Bennett sister and her foppish rich boyfriend anyway) and pause-and-rewind-and-play-and-pause-again on the good parts (Mr. Darcy leaping into a pond and emerging with clinging white shirt is always good for at least a half-dozen takes – more if a second bottle of wine is being consumed).
Jane feels a catch in her throat and a slight burning sensation in her eyes that she chooses to attribute to the dust in her flat. She smooths the flap of the envelope and stands up, pushing the hard wooden chair as far under the table as it will go so she can make space in the tiny galley kitchen for someone to walk through.
Not that anyone walks here but her.
She realizes, as she hurries down the street to the red mailbox – postbox, she corrects herself mentally – that there’s something depressing about that fact. That in two full months she has yet to meet a person she knows well enough to invite them over.
The obligatory post-work pints with her co-workers on Fridays always end early, when each of the women traipses off home to husband and children and the token man heads out to meet his partner for an evening at the opera or the theatre.
Then she just seeks shelter in her flat, curled up with butter chicken or fish and chips – depending which takeaway she’s stopped at on the way home from the tube station – and reading. Or writing enthusiastic letters to Carmen about how exciting London is. How vibrant. How busy. How full of culture and life and sights and experiences.
All of which is true, she consoles herself whenever a pang of guilt hits her for not being honest with her oldest, truest, closest friend. London is vibrant and busy and full of culture and life and sights and eperiences. Just because she hasn’t had any experiences yet doesn’t mean she can’t.
It’s that thought that makes her stop in the street as she starts to turn to head back to her flat.
Her eyes fall on the Lamb’s Head the end of the street. Two months here and she hasn’t even gone in for a pint. Carmen would be horrified.
The thought of describing for Carmen an evening in a real British pub is enough to drive Jane over the threshold and into its dark, smoky interior.
It’s not the most promising start to an exciting London social life, she thinks, her eyes taking in the ragtag assortment of drinkers at the various scuffed tables. Who should she approach first: the two pimply-faced boys who don’t look old enough to drink, the solitary man who’s hunched over a pint glass staring so intently at it that he looks almost asleep, or the table of pensioners complaining loudly about the weather and the fortunes of something called Arsenal, which she suspects is a soccer team – football, she adjusts quickly.
Jane straightens her shoulders and marches to the bar with what she hopes is the confident stride of someone who’s accustomed to such things.
“Whaddya fancy?”
The spike-haired, nose-ringed bartender turns a questioning gaze on Jane.
“Um …” Jane realizes her attempt to appear like an old hat at this ordering pints thing would be helped by having even the faintest clue about British beer.
She stares back at the bartender, feeling foolish.
The bartender winks and grins. “Been a hard day, has it? Pint of the best, then?”
Jane finds her voice.
“Depends what you call the best.” She attempts what she hopes is a grin but fears it may look more like a grimace. “I really can’t stand beer, actually.”
The bartender raises his eyebrows at Jane, but he doesn’t have a chance to speak before a new voice enters the conversation.
“Then you’re drinking the wrong beer.”
Jane turns at the sound of a warm baritone with a Colin Firth accent and is surprised to find the solitary, pint-glass-gazing man watching her from his perch at the end of the bar. With, she can’t help but note, a pair of what seems at this distance to be green eyes regarding her with something approaching amusement underneath a headful of dark, slightly rumpled curls.
“You Americans just don’t know beer.”
Jane wants to be offended at the error, but she’s too distracted by the undone top button of the white shirt pint-glass man is wearing under a dark suit. Not to mention the slight humorous quirk at the corner of his mouth.
She shakes herself mentally.
“Canadian, actually.” She grins, and this time it doesn’t feel forced.
He smacks his forehead playfully with the palm of one hand, and his mouth quirks again.
“Ah, from the colonies.”
She’d try to work up the energy to be offended, but the man has by now gotten off his stool and come over to sit beside her.
All Jane can do is keep grinning, afraid she looks foolish but not able to do anytthing about it.
“She’ll have a Caffery’s,” he tells the bartender. “On me.”
To Jane, he proffers a smile and an outstretched hand. (A large, strong-looking hand, despite the paleness of his skin, Jane notes. Not that she’s easily distracted.)
“Welcome, oh visitor from the colonies. I’m Nigel.”
Jane takes his hand, hoping her hand isn’t quivering as she shakes his.
“I’m Jane.”
Where’s Carmen when you need her, she wonders. She’s never been good at small talk, and it promises to only be worse when the person small-talking with her happens to look and sound distractingly like Colin Firth’s somewhat younger and quite possibly even hotter brother.
Perhaps it’s the Caffery’s, but talking with Nigel turns out to be no problem at all.
Before the first pint is finished, Jane has managed to tell him that she’s twenty-three, that she hates cats (“afraid of” always sounds so bad, and first impressions are important), that she’s renting a dingy basement flat up the street and that she’s working enough hours in the Irish Shop to pay her bills and save up to backpack around the British Isles.
In return, she acquires the information that he is an only child, that he’s so allergic to cats that he breaks out in hives if he pets one, that he hates football but follows it because everyone else does, that he’s been to New York City once and that he much prefers American – “Canadian,” he corrects himself with the mouth quirk that’s already starting to mesmerize Jane – junk food.
“Take crisps,” he says, gesturing at the line of small packets behind the bar. “What do we have? Monstrous concoctions like beef and mustard and roast chicken – which, I may add, taste absolutely nothing like those two quite delightful dishes. You have marvellous flavours like ketchup and salt-and-vinegar and barbecue.”
The way his mouth rolls around the word ‘barbecue’ makes Jane grin.
“You have better chocolate, though,” she says, patting his hand lightly in what she hopes is read as a playfully consoling gesture. “You know those Cadbury’s bars they sell in the machines in the tube stations for 30 pence? Do you know how many of those I’ve eaten in the past two months?”
Nigel puts a finger on his chin and nods in mock pensiveness.
“Ah, yes, Cadbury’s. But then, you have Smarties. The proper Smarties, I mean. Not ours, which don’t taste the same at all.”
He curls up his mouth and nose in an expression that makes Jane giggle, even while something goes quivery inside her.
“You like Smarties? Smarties are my all-time favourite candy.”
Nigel nods with such vigor that his curls bounce.
“Who couldn’t love a candy you can sort by colour?” He looks so childishly pleased with the thought that Jane giggles again. Then he lowers his voice to a confiding whisper and touches Jane lightly on the arm with one hand. “I always eat the green ones last, because they’re my favourites. But don’t tell anyone. I know it ought to be the red ones.”
Jane feels the warmth of his hand on her arm and realizes that he isn’t moving it away. He’s leaning in so close that she can see the grey flecks in his green eyes and make out the faintest streak of silver at the temples of his dark hair. She sees one curl flopping over his forehead and feels the temptation to reach out towards it and push it away from his face. Is his hair as soft as it looks, she wonders.
It’s fate, she thinks. It must be. What else brought her in here to talk to some guy who looks like Colin Firth, is horrifically allergic to all things feline and turns out to share her penchant for green Smarties? A guy who at this moment has his hand on her arm and is giving her a look that suggests he wouldn’t push her hand away if she did reach for that unruly curl.
She sits still, almost not daring to breathe as she searches her brain for a response that won’t use the words ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ – she doesn’t know much about British men, but she’s reasonably certain they wouldn’t be any more comfortable than their Canadian counterparts with the use of such phrases before they’ve even asked you on a date.
A date. Just think, she could even end up with a date. She might have some genuine, honest-to-gooness British male encounter to write Carmen about. Maybe he’ll even come over to her flat. She could cook him something Canadian. What’s Canadian, she wonders. Maybe hamburgers? No, that’s silly, who’d cook hamburgers for a romantic evening. Carmen would have an idea. Maybe she should –
“Nigel!”
Jane’s musings are brought to an abrupt halt by a booming voice that makes every head in the pub turn. A red-haired man strides across the pub, claps a hand on Nigel’s shoulder.
“Here so early? Where’s the wondrous Miranda?”
Nigel’s glance flicks from Jane to the red-haired man and back to Jane again.
Jane stands abruptly.
“Don’t let me keep you,” she says, pleased to hear that her voice sounds casual and unconcerned. “Thanks for the pint.”
As she turns to leave, she sees Nigel lift his hand as though he is about to touch her.
She doesn’t pause, and Nigel doesn’t say anything else.
To be fair, Jane thinks as she leaves the pub, he didn’t have a chance to say much. The red-haired man had already launched into a stream of conversation – all to do, as far as Jane can tell, with “the wondrous Miranda.”
Not that Jane feels like being fair.
What the hell was he doing flirting with her if he’s involved with someone called the Wondrous Miranda? And what the hell was she doing even for a moment believing in fate?
At least, Jane thinks, it’s good to know that British guys are just as much jackasses as Canadian ones.
She finds the thought oddly cheering, and she quickens her pace to hurry back to the flat.
****
“Nigel, old chap, you are a prize idiot.”
He mutters it to himself out loud, feeling strangely cheered by defining the situation in such black-and-white terms. It’s not that he’s trying to figure out a way to piece his heart back together. It’s not that he’s fallen victim to unfortunate timing and the loud mouth of the world’s most tactless friend. And it’s not that he’s pinning his hopes on this mission to track down one American – Canadian, he mentally adjusts – shopgirl amidst the throngs of tourists in Covent Garden.
No, it’s merely that he’s a prize idiot.
That fact having been satisfactorily defined, Nigel stops to look in the window of yet another shop, where yet another attractive shopgirl is folding clothes and shelving them neatly. She glances up and smiles as she catches Nigel’s eye through the window, and Nigel smiles halfheartedly back. Tall, blonde, immpeccably dressed and flawlessly made up – not remotely like the girl he’s searching for, with her tousled sandy hair and shy smile and the jeans-and-white-shirt look he’s always found so appealing.
She’d made him laugh. At what, he isn’t entirely sure. He just knew that he felt better talking to her than he had in weeks. Which was what had driven him to Covent Garden on a foolish mission to find one shop girl in this maze of streets and stalls.
Nigel turns and trudges on, promising himself that he’ll only walk to end of this street. After that, he’ll head home.
Alone. To an empty flat.
Nigel pushes the thoughts away and pauses to look in the next window.
And stops in something approaching astonishment as he sees the small, sandy-haired figure neatly folding Aran sweaters and returning them to the shelf.
He squares his shoulders and pushes open the shop door.
She turns as the jingle of a bell announces his arrival, and Nigel can see she’s about to speak – probably, he figures, to politely tell him that it’s closing time and that he should move along.
Then her face changes, and Nigel watches a smile start to form before flickering off nearly as quickly as it began.
“Hullo,” he says. (Great opening line, Nigel, he berates himself. Way to really make an impression.)
“Hello,” she says back, her soft accented voice sounding unsure of the level of warmth with which she should infuse her greeting.
He wonders if he should pretend he just happened to wander in, buy a Waterford vase for his grandmother and engage her in small talk long enough to assure her that all things weren’t really what they appeared to be.
“I came looking for you,” is what he says instead. “I’m glad I tracked you down.”
“You found me,” she replies lightly, still not quite smiling and not taking any steps to move closer to him. But there’s enough warmth in her expression that Nigel feels encouraged to continue.
“In the pub the other night –“ he starts, then tries a new tack. “The thing is …”
He hears his voice trail off helplessly.
Good job, Nigel, way to impress her with your stellar conversational ability.
“Don’t worry about it.” She shrugs and waves a hand casually, as though batting away a small insect. “It was nice to meet you. And I appreciate you buying me the pint.”
She turns back to the sweaters, although as far as Nigel can see everything’s folded so neatly that there’s nothing left for her to do. Her small shoulders are stiff, and something about the tight posture of the thin back suggests she’s getting ready to ask him to leave.
“The thing is, I’m not with Miranda anymore.”
The words are out almost before Nigel can register that he’s even planned to say them. But he’s relieved to see her turn around and regard him warily.
She doesn’t say anything, and Nigel plunges on.
“Harry’s a great bloke, but he has a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. That night I met you, I was going to explain to the lads about Miranda. That it was over.”
Nigel realizes with some surprise that this may, in fact, be the first time he’s defined that particular truth aloud.
“It’s been over for ages, actually. I could never tell them. They all loved Miranda. She was –“
“Wondrous,” Jane supplies drily, but with a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.
Nigel is surprised to find himself laughing.
“Indeed. Wondrous,” he said. “She was wondrous, and it was –“
He pulls himself up short.
“Well, it just was. But it’s not anymore, and I had a great time meeting you, and the thing is –“
Nigel digs into his pocket.
“I wanted to bring you these.”
He holds out the small box, and Jane laughs then.
“Smarties? You came all the way here to bring me Smarties?”
“They’re the false British kind, I’m afraid. But they’re the best we can do.”
He hears the ‘we’ and feels heat creeping across his face, cursing the pale English skin that allows him to still manage to blush like a teenage girl.
Jane grins and takes the proffered box.
“In that case, kind sir, I’ll take them. Shall we go somewhere to sort them and eat the green ones last?”
Sometimes, Nigel thinks, it really is that easy.
*
Sometimes, Jane thinks, it really is that idiotic.
That ridiciously, stupidly, senselessly idiotic.
She watches him walk out the door of the pub, unable to stop admiring the broad back and well-formed ass even while knowing full well that every step said back and ass made away from her was one step farther away from any hope that fate really was on her side.
Serves me right, she reprimands herself, for being so stupid as to write Carmen that long letter telling her all about it.
And it’s just so incredible, the scrawled words had gushed across the page.
Funny thing, at first I was just attracted to him because he was so, well, Colin-Firth-like. Now I don’t think he looks anything like Colin – although I do think they sound the same, even though Nigel insists his accent is very middle-class and not posh at all.
But the more time we spend together, the more I realize how funny and sweet he is, and what a genuinely nice guy he is.
Whenever we go out we end up talking for hours and hours. I think he knows more about me by now than anyone – except of course you! I even told him about Neil. I never thought I’d tell anyone about Neil.
It was easy to tell him. It kind of helped, I guess, that he’s been getting over someone too. Mind you, his wasn’t a drama. He say it was just waking up one morning and suddenly realizing that this perfect life he was building with this perfect person wasn’t what he wanted at all. That he saw a future with big job, big money, big house, two children and no real himself in it anywhere.
He was so dazzled by how perfect she was, he says, that he didn’t stop to think for months that he wasn’t happy. That he was always worried about what to wear, what to say, what to do, how to behave, and never thinking about whether he even wanted to be there.
She didn’t even cry when he told her it was over. Can you believe that? Think of all the tears I spilled over Neil.
And, if I’m honest, think of all the tears I’d spill if Nigel walked up to me even now and said it was over.
And she had to go and write that why, exactly? Jane sits at the scuffed table, realizing that the promised tears are indeed ready to spill into the half-drunk pint of Cafferty’s.
It was all so stupid, anyway. So foolish and stupid that she’d laugh if she wasn’t so ready to cry.
It was Elsbeth’s fault, really.
She and Elsbeth were closing up together, and Jane was watching for Nigel as she finished putting the sweaters away, keeping one eye on the street outside and one on making sure all the sizes got put back in the right place.
“Waiting for that fine new bit of yours, are you?” Elsbeth teased her. “Nice work on that front. Nothing like shagging a fanciable fellow like Nigel to pay back that Neil, right? And he works in the City. Wait until Neil hears you’ve got a rich and gorgeous bloke. He’ll be crawling back to you crying before you know it.”
I don’t want him to crawl back to me, Jane wanted to say.
But she didn’t. Because, of course, Nigel chose that precise moment to walk up.
So she made no reply at all, just shot a glare at Elsbeth and reached up to kiss Nigel.
Who offered her a polite peck and then drew back.
Nigel didn’t reach for her hand or slide his arm around her shoulders as they strolled towards the tube station. And he didn’t make any comment when she reached out to squeeze him around the waist. Or when she snuggled up to him in the crowded tube car and joked that for a change she would enjoy getting squashed up against the person next to her.
In fact, Nigel didn’t say anything at all the entire journey to Camden Town.
He didn’t utter so much as a syllable until they’d sat down at the corner table in the Lamb’s Head with their pints of Caffery’s.
Then, as Jane stared at him with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, he finally spoke.
“So that’s what I am, is it? Just some fanciable bloke with money you can shag to make Neil jealous?”
Jane was wordless, unsure whether to be angry or hurt or to laugh at the whole stupid situation.
“So that is it, then.” Nigel’s voice was quiet and calm, but with an edge Jane hadn’t heard in it before. “That’s all this has been to you. Just a chance to shag some British bloke so you can call up your friend and tell her all about it and she can help you make Neil jealous. I hope it’s worked well for you.”
“Nigel …” Even to Jane’s own ears, her voice sounded faint. “Nigel, that’s not – it’s not – you’re not … I mean …”
She couldn’t make words. Wasn’t entirely sure at that moment how to string syllables together into something that even remotely resembled a sentence.
“Don’t bother, Jane. I’m not always quick, but I’m not stupid either.”
Nigel took a ten-pound note from his wallet and dropped it on the table.
And Jane, still wordless, still frozen to her chair, incapable of either movement or speech, could do nothing but watch him walk away.
****
No.
She’s not sitting here watching this. She is not letting him walk away like that without even saying a word.
She shoves aside her chair. sets down the half-drunk pint so quickly that Caffery’s sloshes onto the table, and dashes out into the street.
It’s only been a few minutes, hasn’t it? He can’t have gotten far, can he?
She looks up and down the street but sees no sign of him. Wonders if she should start to run in the direction of the tube station, if she could catch him before he crossed the barriers and descended into the Northern Line again.
But he’s so much taller. And faster. Chances are she’ll miss him. If that’s even where he’s gone.
Go home, she tells herself. You can call him later and talk about it. It’ll be okay.
She isn’t convinced. But she has no better idea.
So she turns her feet in the direction of her flat and walks slowly off.
“Jane!”
Her heart leaps for a moment but falls when she realizes it’s not Nigel’s voice. It’s probably not even directed at her. Think how many Janes there must be in the world.
Then she jumps as a hand clasps her shoulder.
lt’s Harry, face nearly as red as his hair, apparently from the exertion of having actually hurried to catch up with her.
“Glad I caught you, Jane. Heading home so early?”
Jane nods mutely, not wanting to be drawn into conversation with the ebullient Harry at this of all moments.
“Nonsense. You’re coming in for a drink. Graham and Steve will be here before you know it, and Nigel’s here already, I take it?”
“No, he’s –“
Jane tries to protest, but Harry is tugging at her arm so violently that it almost hurts, and she’s afraid of trying to launch into an explanation in the street and ending up in tears.
So she follows, meekly enough, and keeps her head down as Harry nudges her into a seat at the corner table she’d just vacated and heads to the bar.
She stares down at the table, tracing patterns in the scuff marks with one listless finger, as she waits for the return of Harry and tries to come up with the words to form an explanation for Nigel’s absence.
Then something falls onto the table with a light plink. Something small and purple.
Followed by a few dozen more small colourful objects cascading across the table’s scuffed surface.
And a man’s hand, holding up one small green Smartie.
She looks up and meets a pair of grey-flecked green eyes.
“I’m an idiot.”
Nigel smiles, and she’s smiling back without conscious thought.
“I knew I was an idiot the moment I walked away, and I was just about to come back when I ran into Harry. He promised to keep you here long enough for me to run to the shop for these.”
He reaches his hand towards Jane’s face, and she opens her lips, capturing the Smartie on her tongue.
She savours it slowly, sucking off the sweet coating and feeling the chocolate melt away on her tongue.
Then she folds her arms across her chest and levels what she hopes is a stern gaze at Nigel.
“This doesn’t mean you’re forgiven.”
He hangs his head, putting on a penitent-schoolboy face that very nearly makes her laugh. But she sets her lips in a tight frown.
“Don’t you ever, ever, do that to me again. You know I’m so glad I met you and I care about you desperately and if you ever walk away from me like that I might just cry.”
Jane’s cheeks blaze, and she knows she’s blushing. But she feels something inside her leap when she sees an answering pink on his own cheeks.
“Might?” He says softly, reaching out a hand and stroking her cheek. “If you ever walked away from me like that, I know I’d cry.”
She meets his gaze and sees something in the grey-green eyes that starts a warm feeling in her, a glow that starts deep down in her core and slowly expands to fill every part of her, every inch of muscle and bone and skin.
She turns her face up to kiss him.
And finds herself staring instead at three pint glasses being plunked onto the table with force.
“So, my little ones, have we made up?”
Harry is watching them both. Laughing and shaking his head with an expression that says, I know I’m playing gooseberry right now, and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.
He doesn’t wait for an answer. Just slides into the chair beside Jane and slings an arm carelessly around her shoulders.
“Well, my young colonial friend, tell me. Do you know any lovely Canadian girls who want to meet a handsome British fellow?”
Just wait till I write to Carmen, Jane thinks.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Welcome to my ramblings!
Hey there, friends!
Welcome to the scribblings, musings and literary efforts of one small person on one big planet.
You'll find a variety of work here: stories written for various fiction writing classes; stories written for a "Story Club" made up of a group of six co-workers in the newsroom; stories written for no reason at all; reflections on being alive.
I'd love any feedback you have to offer (good or bad) and always welcome suggestions for change and improvement.
Not to mention titles, which is probably my weakest area.
Please peruse to your heart's content, and bookmark me for future reference. ;-)
Welcome to the scribblings, musings and literary efforts of one small person on one big planet.
You'll find a variety of work here: stories written for various fiction writing classes; stories written for a "Story Club" made up of a group of six co-workers in the newsroom; stories written for no reason at all; reflections on being alive.
I'd love any feedback you have to offer (good or bad) and always welcome suggestions for change and improvement.
Not to mention titles, which is probably my weakest area.
Please peruse to your heart's content, and bookmark me for future reference. ;-)
Under One Sky
This is not fiction, but rather some random musings from around the campfire during our roadtrip last summer.
*
The sky is casting a golden glow over the Arizona desert as I perch on the edge of the hill and look out over the plains below. As the setting sun turns the sky to fire, I watch the rock grow red and the sagebrush become a dusky bronze shadow.
A warm wind ruffles my hair. All around me the chorus of crickets raises its collective voice into the evening sky. In the distance a solitary dog barks.
In this moment, a sense of contentment steals over me. A pure joy. A wonder. An awe and a reverence for the vastness of the creation that surrounds me.
In this moment, a realization strikes me.
We are all sharing this sky. Every one of us.
The old Navajo man we met wandering down the road whose dream is to go salmon fishing in British Columbia. The baby-faced Nebraskan state trooper who was interrupted in his evening wildlife watching by a speeding car from British Columbia. The park rangers at Mesa Verde whose respect for the sacred place they are entrusted to keep safe is instilled in everyone who visits the land. Even the fractious child in the tent trailer at Yellowstone whose middle-of-the-night tantrum awakened his campsite neighbours.
And most of all, you.
All of you. My friends, my family, my connections in every corner of the globe.
At this moment you too are sharing this sky with me.
For some of you it is still daytime. You are out and about in the sun – or the rain – taking care of your daily business. For others, it is evening too. You are sitting in your backyards or curled up on your couches or relaxing on your cabin porches, enjoying this summer (or winter) moment. For still others it is long since nighttime. You are warm in your beds, sleeping soundly under a starry sky.
I think of you all, and I wish I could capture this moment for every one of you.
I wish there was a song or a painting or a film or a dance that could evoke the feeling of this moment, in this place, under this sky.
I wish there was a way I could share with you this feeling – of wonder, of awe, of reverence. And, most of all, of belief.
Of belief in yourself. In the rightness of your place in the world and in your ability to make a difference to it, in some small way.
Of belief in others. In the inherent goodness of all beings and of our essential sameness and commonality as members of the human race.
Of belief in creation. In the wonder of the environment that surrounds us and in the sacred trust we hold to look after it – for now, and for all time.
Of belief in God. Whatever you call Him, however you see Him – or Her: a supreme being who has shaped the universe, a collection of life forces and energies of nature, a personal friend who helps to guide your daily life.
Of belief in dreams. In the knowing that those visions and hopes and plans you hold within you – those you talk about aloud and those you hold in some deep silent place in your soul – can indeed come to be.
This is what I want to share – in song, in painting, in film, in dance.
And dance I do – a silly, spontaneous, jumping, twirling dance against the backdrop of the setting sun.
Then I sit. And I contemplate the world in front of me and I take my tools – letters and syllables, words and phrases– and try to rebuild it all for you.
The sky. The sun. The sage. The crickets. The warm wind and the red rocks and the immensity of the universe in which we live.
And this feeling I want to leave you with. This wonder. This joy. This peace.
This knowing that, wherever we are, we are one. Joined by one creation.
Under one sky.
*
The sky is casting a golden glow over the Arizona desert as I perch on the edge of the hill and look out over the plains below. As the setting sun turns the sky to fire, I watch the rock grow red and the sagebrush become a dusky bronze shadow.
A warm wind ruffles my hair. All around me the chorus of crickets raises its collective voice into the evening sky. In the distance a solitary dog barks.
In this moment, a sense of contentment steals over me. A pure joy. A wonder. An awe and a reverence for the vastness of the creation that surrounds me.
In this moment, a realization strikes me.
We are all sharing this sky. Every one of us.
The old Navajo man we met wandering down the road whose dream is to go salmon fishing in British Columbia. The baby-faced Nebraskan state trooper who was interrupted in his evening wildlife watching by a speeding car from British Columbia. The park rangers at Mesa Verde whose respect for the sacred place they are entrusted to keep safe is instilled in everyone who visits the land. Even the fractious child in the tent trailer at Yellowstone whose middle-of-the-night tantrum awakened his campsite neighbours.
And most of all, you.
All of you. My friends, my family, my connections in every corner of the globe.
At this moment you too are sharing this sky with me.
For some of you it is still daytime. You are out and about in the sun – or the rain – taking care of your daily business. For others, it is evening too. You are sitting in your backyards or curled up on your couches or relaxing on your cabin porches, enjoying this summer (or winter) moment. For still others it is long since nighttime. You are warm in your beds, sleeping soundly under a starry sky.
I think of you all, and I wish I could capture this moment for every one of you.
I wish there was a song or a painting or a film or a dance that could evoke the feeling of this moment, in this place, under this sky.
I wish there was a way I could share with you this feeling – of wonder, of awe, of reverence. And, most of all, of belief.
Of belief in yourself. In the rightness of your place in the world and in your ability to make a difference to it, in some small way.
Of belief in others. In the inherent goodness of all beings and of our essential sameness and commonality as members of the human race.
Of belief in creation. In the wonder of the environment that surrounds us and in the sacred trust we hold to look after it – for now, and for all time.
Of belief in God. Whatever you call Him, however you see Him – or Her: a supreme being who has shaped the universe, a collection of life forces and energies of nature, a personal friend who helps to guide your daily life.
Of belief in dreams. In the knowing that those visions and hopes and plans you hold within you – those you talk about aloud and those you hold in some deep silent place in your soul – can indeed come to be.
This is what I want to share – in song, in painting, in film, in dance.
And dance I do – a silly, spontaneous, jumping, twirling dance against the backdrop of the setting sun.
Then I sit. And I contemplate the world in front of me and I take my tools – letters and syllables, words and phrases– and try to rebuild it all for you.
The sky. The sun. The sage. The crickets. The warm wind and the red rocks and the immensity of the universe in which we live.
And this feeling I want to leave you with. This wonder. This joy. This peace.
This knowing that, wherever we are, we are one. Joined by one creation.
Under one sky.
The Coffeeshop
Originally stemming from a class assignment at UBC, in which we were asked to imagine two people we know who don't know each other, meeting in a situation in which one was coping with something terrible.
With apologies to the two people whom I based these characters on, because really, they aren't like this at all! ;-)
*
I spotted him right away that first day, sitting all alone at a table in the corner.
He looked out of place for some reason I couldn’t really put my finger on.
I mean, it’s not as if this place gets any one particular crowd. It’s not tofu-and-granola like the Drive or Lululemon yogawear like Robson Street. It’s just a plain old non-brand-name coffeeshop on a back street in East Vancouver. On any given day, I’ll serve stressed-out commuters drumming their fingers on the counter while they wait for their non-fat lattes, students counting their dimes to pay for their small chai teas and old folks from the home on the corner who come in for their all-day cups of just-coffee-please-dear.
So I don’t know why this guy stood out. It’s not like he was some Matthew McConaughey type whom I’d try to impress with my winning smile.
He was old, let’s face it. Older than my dad, even, sixty-five or maybe pushing seventy. He wasn’t a down-and-outer and he wasn’t a pain in the ass like some old guys. He didn’t try to fake-flirt with me or call me sweetheart or make some comment about how most young girls these days are just too skinny and it’s nice to see there’s still a fine armful or two left in the world.
(This I’m not kidding about. Some guy actually said that to me once. I’d’ve slapped him, but Frank frowns on that sort of thing and Lord knows I need this paycheque if I’m going to get that damn journalism diploma any time soon.)
So, anyhow, there he was, just this random ordinary old guy, sitting alone, quietly drinking a large cup of coffee.
Double double, he’d ordered it, which made me think he was a bit of Tim’s aficionado, probably someone from back east desperately searching for anywhere that wasn’t Starbucks.
I couldn’t tell you why I took it upon myself to walk over to his table. I have to make the rounds periodically to wipe tables and clear away newspapers, but Frank sure doesn’t pay me enough to make small talk with the damn customers.
Nonetheless, for this guy, I turned on my legendary winning smile.
(Legendary in my own mind, maybe, but I’m practising. When I finally write that bestseller, that tearjerker about the working-class girl from the wrong side of town who finally gets a break after years of struggle and several tormented relationships, Oprah’s going to want me on her show. Guaranteed. And then I’m going to need all the kilowattage I can get. It’ll distract them from the rest of me.)
“How’s the coffee?” I asked the old guy in my best, bright serving-wench tone.
Guys seem to like that tone usually. If this one had been a little more Matthew-like (or, let’s face it, Paul Newman-like; age need not be an obstacle), I’d’ve probably added something about the coffee being hot and rich. Never sure why, but if you say those words in just the right tone, guys totally get off on it. Some of them practically pop a boner. Seriously.
This quiet old guy looked startled, like being talked to by the waitress (okay, okay, server, I’ll get with the 21st century) was the last thing he’d expected. He didn’t exactly focus on me, but he did at least turn his head to acknowledge my presence.
“Fine, thank you.”
His voice, I gotta say, was actually pretty cool. Nice, deep, warm, a sort of a late-night, easy-listening radio voice. Which may be what made me stop a second more.
“Haven’t seen you in here before, have I?” (Serving Wench has no original lines, but she does have a little dimple, that winning smile and a darned perky attitude, if I do say so myself.) “Are you from around here?”
This time, he made more of an effort, meeting Serving Wench’s smile with a polite one of his own.
“No, I’m in town visiting my daughter.”
Who apparently isn’t much of a tour guide, I figured, if she lets her perfectly nice dad sit all alone in a shitty East Van coffeeshop. But what do I know?
“That’s nice,” Serving Wench said in her overbright, dimpled way. “She must be happy to have you here.”
He’d looked away by then, and he didn’t look back.
“Yes, of course.”
But his tone was such that even Serving Wench saw no point in continuing the conversation.
So I walked off and carried on with the usual – making coffee, cleaning tables, keeping up a running patter with the customers and hoping for something extra in the tip jar so I could eat something other than peanut butter sandwiches and canned ham for the next week.
I’d like to claim I was prescient. That I knew Mr. Radio Voice and I were fated to meet again.
But since this is fact, and it’s not always as conveniently constructed as fiction, I had no clue. I figured he was one of the thousands of people whom I see once, exchange a word or two with and never see again. (It always strikes me as a little sad, actually, that so much human contact is essentially meaningless. We pass by each other, we smile, we speak, but what is any of it for? Does any of it matter?)
So I gotta say, I was a little surprised to see him the next morning. Same table, same order, same quiet demeanour.
He didn’t seem to recognize me at first, which I must say offended me somewhat, but he was pleasant enough when I headed back in his direction to wipe tables.
“Hello again,” Serving Wench said cheerfully. “Enjoying your visit with your daughter?”
He smiled. But it was one of those automatic, because-it’s-expected smiles, not the big heartfelt grin of a doting dad.
“Of course,” he answered politely.
What came over me, I’ll never know. Playing along with customers is part of the job. And if Mr. Radio Voice wanted to stiff-upper-lip his way through whatever family drama this was, who was I to rock the boat.
I should’ve smiled and kept wiping tables.
I didn’t.
What I said instead, with what I hoped would pass for a ruefully sympathetic grin, was, “Daughters, eh? They can be quite the handful.”
For a moment, I figured he was just going to make one of those polite non-comments. Then, when he reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, I figured he was about to slap a loonie on the table as my shut-up tip and walk out.
Instead, he flipped it open to one of those little plastic envelopes of pictures that all old people seem to carry in their wallets. There she was. The daughter. And the son-in-law, I observed astutely, from the fact that she was in a long white dress and he was in a tux.
Size 4, of course, the skinny little bitch. Although I immediately consoled myself with the observation that her hips, at any rate, were pushing size 6 (heaven forbid) and that she probably whines all the time about her tiny little non-boobs.
In fairness, she was a pleasant-enough looking girl. No beauty, but with long blondish hair – smooth and straight, I’ll never understand how some girls can make their hair do that – and a shy but pretty smile. The son-in-law looked nice, too, with a warm, beaming grin and a slightly round face that gave him a kind of cuddly look.
So, of course, Serving Wench said the expected, complete with winning smile: “They’re a nice-looking couple. How long have they been married?”
Mr. Radio Voice looked puzzled for a moment.
“Oh. Five – no – six years. Maybe seven. I’m not very good with dates,” he said. “My wife keeps the calendar.”
Presumably, someone more astute might have noticed the way his voice faltered on that last sentence. How he started to say something else, stopped, shook his head a bit, cleared his throat a bit. How he looked, well, sad.
But oh, no, not Serving Wench. She just grinned again.
“Oh, that’s pretty typical, isn’t it? My mom’s like that. Does your wife always nag you about being late, too?”
Again, I’d like to claim I saw it coming. But I didn’t picture, in this skewy, inconvenient world of fact, what happened next.
How this nice, quiet, polite old man, sitting so straight and drinking his coffee, just started to crumple.
It was the oddest thing. I’ve never seen a person do that. As if all of a sudden the weight of it all – his bones and fat and skin and hair and clothing – was just too much for his muscles to take, and his body just slowly started to collapse in on itself.
Which isn’t even really what happened because he didn’t fall. He didn’t faceplant in the coffee cup or slide off the chair or anything like that. It’s more as if all the life, all the breath, all the blood running through his veins, just left him and he vanished and there was just a shell of him there.
Quietly, without the slightest trace of sound, he started to cry.
Not just the poetic single tear down the cheek that makes such a beautiful closeup moment in a film. But a real deluge of salt water and sobs that shook his body.
I don’t know when it started and when it finished.
I was so startled I just pulled a chair over to the table beside him and sat down – placing myself between him and the rest of the coffeeshop, with the thought somewhere in the back of my mind that maybe he wouldn’t want strangers to see him cry.
I let his tears subside before I said, quietly, ever so quietly, “What happened?”
If this was fiction, I probably should’ve said something better than that. Can I help? might make me sound more magnanimous, less just plain nosy. Do you want to talk about it? might make me sound more considerate, less pushy.
But the fact is, I said, “What happened?”
And the fact is, he answered.
So softly that I barely heard him.
“She’s dead.”
For a moment of confusion, I thought he meant the daughter and wondered what had happened since he’d come to town. Had she been hit by a bus on her way to work? Crashed her car after a night of drinking? Had an unexpected heart attack while exercising in the gym to keep those size 6 hips under control?
Then, of course, I realized he meant the wife.
What do you say to a guy who’s lost his wife?
“I’m sorry” would be the usual response, I guess, but that’s so conventional as to have lost all meaning.
So, for a change, I said nothing.
And, for a change, I seem to have done the right thing.
He started to talk then.
I’m still surprised Frank never came over to pull me away from that table. But maybe even he sensed there was something more going on than me trying to chat up a potential sugar-daddy.
I can’t even remember everything Radio Voice told me.
But I remember thinking she’d be a neat mom.
She was full of life, he said. When their girl – Laura – was little, she could never get enough of playing with her, running and jumping and dancing and skipping around the yard.
She never lost that energy, even when she got older. She still loved to run and jump and skip, although she usually only danced when no one was looking. She’d never drive somewhere if she could walk. She became known around town for her power walks everywhere – to the grocery store, to church, to the soup kitchen where she volunteered – and everyone who knew her got used to calling out the window as they drove past.
“Looking good today, Norma!” they’d call. “Keep it up there, girl!”
Norma wasn’t sentimental. She was never into flowers and love songs and Hallmark moments. For her birthday, she just liked to be taken out to dinner. Always to a plain restaurant – no fancy food for her, a steakhouse would be just fine, thank you. And she didn’t do Valentine’s Day or anniversaries, though she’d never say no if you wanted to buy her chocolates. (But you could do that for any reason, for a random Tuesday or just-because Friday. You didn’t have to wait for a holiday.)
She loved to travel, did Norma. She was never a fan of foreign food (give her meat and potatoes any day) but she’d always screw up her courage to try something new, wrinkling her nose and closing her eyes before taking a bite, and sometimes she’d end up liking it. Retsina was a taste she acquired in Greece. Falafels became a staple after a pilgrimage to the Middle East. And, though she never could bring herself to eat it again, she prided herself on that time she’d finished an entire bowl of spicy hot-and-sour soup at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Thailand.
She was gutsy. She spoke her mind. She often irritated the ladies of the Catholic Women’s League with her to-the-point way of cutting through the dithering and getting straight to the decision. She wasn’t afraid to tell people she knew better, and she was usually right.
She was independent. She didn’t have a job after Laura was born. She didn’t see a need to, and she liked being a stay-home mom – a decision she often had to defend to her sisters-in-law, who thought she was a disappointment to the women’s movement.
But that didn’t make her a June Cleaver, by any stretch of the imagination. She cooked only when she had to (she much preferred it when her husband came home early and took his turn at the stove), and her baking repertoire consisted only of chocolate-chip cookies. But they were the best chocolate-chip cookies in the world, everyone said so, and she used to make extra so Laura could take them to school for her friends.
All the friends hung out at her house, even in high school, because they all loved Laura’s mom so much. They all called her Mom, mostly in affection and occasionally in annoyance.
She could be tender. Loving. Warm.
Not many people saw that side of her, though. Only her daughter and her husband ever knew how soft, how cuddly she could be. How she loved to be held and give hugs and kisses and snuggle up under a flannel blanket with both of them watching a movie on Friday nights.
“She was my world.”
He said that.
Just like that, right out loud. In a voice filled with such emotion that I couldn’t doubt he meant it.
And I gotta tell you, I felt a little tug at the thought, wondering if any man will ever say that about me.
I probably shouldn’t have thought that. In fiction, I’d never create a narrator who was so bloody self-absorbed as to immediately think about herself. It was a bit selfish to start lamenting my own singlehood in the face of the grief of this nice, polite man who’d just lost his wife of thirty-seven years.
To an end that was so predictable as to almost seem a fictional construct of its own.
Cancer.
He said the word slowly, clearly, as though by enunciating the two syllables so crisply he’d be able to take away some of its power.
She never stopped being herself. Even when the radiation and chemo stole most of her away, wasted her down to next-to-nothing, Norma was still as gutsy and opinionated and loving as ever.
They were there to the end, he and Laura, and they sat beside her, each holding a hand, when she slipped away from them.
Then Laura left. Caught a plane back to the West Coast (didn’t I guess he was from back east? didn’t I tell you?) and hasn’t been back since.
It was seven months ago now, he tells me.
Seven months and he hasn’t talked to his daughter, except the twice-a-month Sunday night phone calls to check in and see how he’s doing.
“Fine, fine,” he’ll always say, telling her about the outings with friends and the dinners with the neighbours and the freezer full of meals cooked by well-meaning church league ladies who want to help look after him.
“Good, good,” she’ll always reply, telling him about the long hours at work and the new car they’ve bought and the vacation they’re planning to Mexico in January.
But they never talk. Not really.
So he came out to visit, hoping they could talk in person.
But they haven’t.
“Norma was the one she talked to,” he tells me, the radio voice breaking a little. “She never could talk to me. She was always such a good girl, but we never had anything to say to each other. Now, without Norma …”
His voice trails off – people’s voices really do that, I notice, it isn’t just a convenient invention of fiction writers who run out of ideas for how to finish sentences.
Unusually for me, I don’t feel compelled to fill the silence with meaningless syllables. I just wait, not talking, for him to finish his thoughts.
He’s worried about Laura.
She’s so much like her mom, he says. Independent and full of opinions – though she’s not right as often as she thinks she is – but warm and loving and kind.
There’s not so much bounce in her step these days, he says. She’s quieter. More subdued.
She’s sad, that much he knows. But he doesn’t know what to say or how to tell her that he’s sad too. That they should be able to be sad together.
He doesn’t know how to tell her.
“Write it down for her,” I hear myself suggest. “When I have trouble saying something, I usually write a letter.”
But he shakes his head.
“I tried that,” he tells me quietly. “But everything I write seems wrong. I never had much of a way with words.”
What I did then surprises me even now.
Usually, my interest in other people’s problems is minimal, and I sure as hell don’t make it a habit to go out of my way to soothe the woes of strangers.
But something about Radio Voice – and I still don’t know his name – made me do it.
“Then let me do it for you,” I say.
He looks startled – as well he might be, since as far as he’s concerned I’m just the Serving Wench who’s brought him two double doubles in two days.
“I’m a journalism student,” I tell him. “And I like to write. Let me try.”
And I add, I kid you not, in the nicest and sweetest and most pleading tone I have ever used in my life: “Please.”
Maybe it was the pleading tone. Maybe he liked my smile. Or maybe he was just so desperate that any idea, no matter how lame, was better than nothing.
But he ended up agreeing. And we worked out a deal.
I’d write it out – how we met, what he told me, what he wanted to tell his daughter – and then I’d e-mail it to her.
He didn’t want to see it first, he said. Which I found a little odd, but he said that if he read it first he’d probably second-guess himself.
“I trust you,” he said in the quiet tone I’d become so used to hearing by then.
And I hate to admit it, but those are the nicest three words anyone’s ever said to me.
He stayed for awhile drinking coffee – I poured him a fresh cup, and I even brought him a piece of carrot cake on the house to go with it.
I went back to work.
He waved when he left. But he didn’t say anything else.
He hasn’t been back in since.
I wonder if he thought I’d really do it.
This is all wrong, of course.
It wasn’t like that at all. I’m not that sassy and your dad’s not that quiet. Probably we both made a lot less sense than I’ve made this sound, made a lot more of those meaningless noises we all use as conversation-fillers. There were probably lots of pauses and gaps and leaps in thought that just wouldn’t translate to the page at all.
Besides, I did it all wrong. I should’ve started in the middle, with some witty anecdote from your childhood or some poignant memory of your mom.
And I gave myself too big a part. I’m not even in this story, really.
But I am now, because he allowed me to be. And because, in a way, we’re all in each other’s stories, aren’t we?
I don’t know a hell of a lot, Laura. And Lord knows you’ve figured out by now that I’m not much of a writer. This jumbled mess of bad description, inane personal observation and failed attempts at witticism will probably convince you that Oprah’s going to be waiting a long time before inviting me on her show.
But the thing is, I do have something to say to you. And that’s really the only point that matters, isn’t it?
He misses your mom.
And he loves you to death.
I don’t know anything else, but those two things I know for absolute certain.
So here it is, for what it’s worth, this story of mine that’s really yours.
You’ve gotta write the ending now.
Make it a good one. Your dad deserves it.
And so, I suspect, do you.
With apologies to the two people whom I based these characters on, because really, they aren't like this at all! ;-)
*
I spotted him right away that first day, sitting all alone at a table in the corner.
He looked out of place for some reason I couldn’t really put my finger on.
I mean, it’s not as if this place gets any one particular crowd. It’s not tofu-and-granola like the Drive or Lululemon yogawear like Robson Street. It’s just a plain old non-brand-name coffeeshop on a back street in East Vancouver. On any given day, I’ll serve stressed-out commuters drumming their fingers on the counter while they wait for their non-fat lattes, students counting their dimes to pay for their small chai teas and old folks from the home on the corner who come in for their all-day cups of just-coffee-please-dear.
So I don’t know why this guy stood out. It’s not like he was some Matthew McConaughey type whom I’d try to impress with my winning smile.
He was old, let’s face it. Older than my dad, even, sixty-five or maybe pushing seventy. He wasn’t a down-and-outer and he wasn’t a pain in the ass like some old guys. He didn’t try to fake-flirt with me or call me sweetheart or make some comment about how most young girls these days are just too skinny and it’s nice to see there’s still a fine armful or two left in the world.
(This I’m not kidding about. Some guy actually said that to me once. I’d’ve slapped him, but Frank frowns on that sort of thing and Lord knows I need this paycheque if I’m going to get that damn journalism diploma any time soon.)
So, anyhow, there he was, just this random ordinary old guy, sitting alone, quietly drinking a large cup of coffee.
Double double, he’d ordered it, which made me think he was a bit of Tim’s aficionado, probably someone from back east desperately searching for anywhere that wasn’t Starbucks.
I couldn’t tell you why I took it upon myself to walk over to his table. I have to make the rounds periodically to wipe tables and clear away newspapers, but Frank sure doesn’t pay me enough to make small talk with the damn customers.
Nonetheless, for this guy, I turned on my legendary winning smile.
(Legendary in my own mind, maybe, but I’m practising. When I finally write that bestseller, that tearjerker about the working-class girl from the wrong side of town who finally gets a break after years of struggle and several tormented relationships, Oprah’s going to want me on her show. Guaranteed. And then I’m going to need all the kilowattage I can get. It’ll distract them from the rest of me.)
“How’s the coffee?” I asked the old guy in my best, bright serving-wench tone.
Guys seem to like that tone usually. If this one had been a little more Matthew-like (or, let’s face it, Paul Newman-like; age need not be an obstacle), I’d’ve probably added something about the coffee being hot and rich. Never sure why, but if you say those words in just the right tone, guys totally get off on it. Some of them practically pop a boner. Seriously.
This quiet old guy looked startled, like being talked to by the waitress (okay, okay, server, I’ll get with the 21st century) was the last thing he’d expected. He didn’t exactly focus on me, but he did at least turn his head to acknowledge my presence.
“Fine, thank you.”
His voice, I gotta say, was actually pretty cool. Nice, deep, warm, a sort of a late-night, easy-listening radio voice. Which may be what made me stop a second more.
“Haven’t seen you in here before, have I?” (Serving Wench has no original lines, but she does have a little dimple, that winning smile and a darned perky attitude, if I do say so myself.) “Are you from around here?”
This time, he made more of an effort, meeting Serving Wench’s smile with a polite one of his own.
“No, I’m in town visiting my daughter.”
Who apparently isn’t much of a tour guide, I figured, if she lets her perfectly nice dad sit all alone in a shitty East Van coffeeshop. But what do I know?
“That’s nice,” Serving Wench said in her overbright, dimpled way. “She must be happy to have you here.”
He’d looked away by then, and he didn’t look back.
“Yes, of course.”
But his tone was such that even Serving Wench saw no point in continuing the conversation.
So I walked off and carried on with the usual – making coffee, cleaning tables, keeping up a running patter with the customers and hoping for something extra in the tip jar so I could eat something other than peanut butter sandwiches and canned ham for the next week.
I’d like to claim I was prescient. That I knew Mr. Radio Voice and I were fated to meet again.
But since this is fact, and it’s not always as conveniently constructed as fiction, I had no clue. I figured he was one of the thousands of people whom I see once, exchange a word or two with and never see again. (It always strikes me as a little sad, actually, that so much human contact is essentially meaningless. We pass by each other, we smile, we speak, but what is any of it for? Does any of it matter?)
So I gotta say, I was a little surprised to see him the next morning. Same table, same order, same quiet demeanour.
He didn’t seem to recognize me at first, which I must say offended me somewhat, but he was pleasant enough when I headed back in his direction to wipe tables.
“Hello again,” Serving Wench said cheerfully. “Enjoying your visit with your daughter?”
He smiled. But it was one of those automatic, because-it’s-expected smiles, not the big heartfelt grin of a doting dad.
“Of course,” he answered politely.
What came over me, I’ll never know. Playing along with customers is part of the job. And if Mr. Radio Voice wanted to stiff-upper-lip his way through whatever family drama this was, who was I to rock the boat.
I should’ve smiled and kept wiping tables.
I didn’t.
What I said instead, with what I hoped would pass for a ruefully sympathetic grin, was, “Daughters, eh? They can be quite the handful.”
For a moment, I figured he was just going to make one of those polite non-comments. Then, when he reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, I figured he was about to slap a loonie on the table as my shut-up tip and walk out.
Instead, he flipped it open to one of those little plastic envelopes of pictures that all old people seem to carry in their wallets. There she was. The daughter. And the son-in-law, I observed astutely, from the fact that she was in a long white dress and he was in a tux.
Size 4, of course, the skinny little bitch. Although I immediately consoled myself with the observation that her hips, at any rate, were pushing size 6 (heaven forbid) and that she probably whines all the time about her tiny little non-boobs.
In fairness, she was a pleasant-enough looking girl. No beauty, but with long blondish hair – smooth and straight, I’ll never understand how some girls can make their hair do that – and a shy but pretty smile. The son-in-law looked nice, too, with a warm, beaming grin and a slightly round face that gave him a kind of cuddly look.
So, of course, Serving Wench said the expected, complete with winning smile: “They’re a nice-looking couple. How long have they been married?”
Mr. Radio Voice looked puzzled for a moment.
“Oh. Five – no – six years. Maybe seven. I’m not very good with dates,” he said. “My wife keeps the calendar.”
Presumably, someone more astute might have noticed the way his voice faltered on that last sentence. How he started to say something else, stopped, shook his head a bit, cleared his throat a bit. How he looked, well, sad.
But oh, no, not Serving Wench. She just grinned again.
“Oh, that’s pretty typical, isn’t it? My mom’s like that. Does your wife always nag you about being late, too?”
Again, I’d like to claim I saw it coming. But I didn’t picture, in this skewy, inconvenient world of fact, what happened next.
How this nice, quiet, polite old man, sitting so straight and drinking his coffee, just started to crumple.
It was the oddest thing. I’ve never seen a person do that. As if all of a sudden the weight of it all – his bones and fat and skin and hair and clothing – was just too much for his muscles to take, and his body just slowly started to collapse in on itself.
Which isn’t even really what happened because he didn’t fall. He didn’t faceplant in the coffee cup or slide off the chair or anything like that. It’s more as if all the life, all the breath, all the blood running through his veins, just left him and he vanished and there was just a shell of him there.
Quietly, without the slightest trace of sound, he started to cry.
Not just the poetic single tear down the cheek that makes such a beautiful closeup moment in a film. But a real deluge of salt water and sobs that shook his body.
I don’t know when it started and when it finished.
I was so startled I just pulled a chair over to the table beside him and sat down – placing myself between him and the rest of the coffeeshop, with the thought somewhere in the back of my mind that maybe he wouldn’t want strangers to see him cry.
I let his tears subside before I said, quietly, ever so quietly, “What happened?”
If this was fiction, I probably should’ve said something better than that. Can I help? might make me sound more magnanimous, less just plain nosy. Do you want to talk about it? might make me sound more considerate, less pushy.
But the fact is, I said, “What happened?”
And the fact is, he answered.
So softly that I barely heard him.
“She’s dead.”
For a moment of confusion, I thought he meant the daughter and wondered what had happened since he’d come to town. Had she been hit by a bus on her way to work? Crashed her car after a night of drinking? Had an unexpected heart attack while exercising in the gym to keep those size 6 hips under control?
Then, of course, I realized he meant the wife.
What do you say to a guy who’s lost his wife?
“I’m sorry” would be the usual response, I guess, but that’s so conventional as to have lost all meaning.
So, for a change, I said nothing.
And, for a change, I seem to have done the right thing.
He started to talk then.
I’m still surprised Frank never came over to pull me away from that table. But maybe even he sensed there was something more going on than me trying to chat up a potential sugar-daddy.
I can’t even remember everything Radio Voice told me.
But I remember thinking she’d be a neat mom.
She was full of life, he said. When their girl – Laura – was little, she could never get enough of playing with her, running and jumping and dancing and skipping around the yard.
She never lost that energy, even when she got older. She still loved to run and jump and skip, although she usually only danced when no one was looking. She’d never drive somewhere if she could walk. She became known around town for her power walks everywhere – to the grocery store, to church, to the soup kitchen where she volunteered – and everyone who knew her got used to calling out the window as they drove past.
“Looking good today, Norma!” they’d call. “Keep it up there, girl!”
Norma wasn’t sentimental. She was never into flowers and love songs and Hallmark moments. For her birthday, she just liked to be taken out to dinner. Always to a plain restaurant – no fancy food for her, a steakhouse would be just fine, thank you. And she didn’t do Valentine’s Day or anniversaries, though she’d never say no if you wanted to buy her chocolates. (But you could do that for any reason, for a random Tuesday or just-because Friday. You didn’t have to wait for a holiday.)
She loved to travel, did Norma. She was never a fan of foreign food (give her meat and potatoes any day) but she’d always screw up her courage to try something new, wrinkling her nose and closing her eyes before taking a bite, and sometimes she’d end up liking it. Retsina was a taste she acquired in Greece. Falafels became a staple after a pilgrimage to the Middle East. And, though she never could bring herself to eat it again, she prided herself on that time she’d finished an entire bowl of spicy hot-and-sour soup at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Thailand.
She was gutsy. She spoke her mind. She often irritated the ladies of the Catholic Women’s League with her to-the-point way of cutting through the dithering and getting straight to the decision. She wasn’t afraid to tell people she knew better, and she was usually right.
She was independent. She didn’t have a job after Laura was born. She didn’t see a need to, and she liked being a stay-home mom – a decision she often had to defend to her sisters-in-law, who thought she was a disappointment to the women’s movement.
But that didn’t make her a June Cleaver, by any stretch of the imagination. She cooked only when she had to (she much preferred it when her husband came home early and took his turn at the stove), and her baking repertoire consisted only of chocolate-chip cookies. But they were the best chocolate-chip cookies in the world, everyone said so, and she used to make extra so Laura could take them to school for her friends.
All the friends hung out at her house, even in high school, because they all loved Laura’s mom so much. They all called her Mom, mostly in affection and occasionally in annoyance.
She could be tender. Loving. Warm.
Not many people saw that side of her, though. Only her daughter and her husband ever knew how soft, how cuddly she could be. How she loved to be held and give hugs and kisses and snuggle up under a flannel blanket with both of them watching a movie on Friday nights.
“She was my world.”
He said that.
Just like that, right out loud. In a voice filled with such emotion that I couldn’t doubt he meant it.
And I gotta tell you, I felt a little tug at the thought, wondering if any man will ever say that about me.
I probably shouldn’t have thought that. In fiction, I’d never create a narrator who was so bloody self-absorbed as to immediately think about herself. It was a bit selfish to start lamenting my own singlehood in the face of the grief of this nice, polite man who’d just lost his wife of thirty-seven years.
To an end that was so predictable as to almost seem a fictional construct of its own.
Cancer.
He said the word slowly, clearly, as though by enunciating the two syllables so crisply he’d be able to take away some of its power.
She never stopped being herself. Even when the radiation and chemo stole most of her away, wasted her down to next-to-nothing, Norma was still as gutsy and opinionated and loving as ever.
They were there to the end, he and Laura, and they sat beside her, each holding a hand, when she slipped away from them.
Then Laura left. Caught a plane back to the West Coast (didn’t I guess he was from back east? didn’t I tell you?) and hasn’t been back since.
It was seven months ago now, he tells me.
Seven months and he hasn’t talked to his daughter, except the twice-a-month Sunday night phone calls to check in and see how he’s doing.
“Fine, fine,” he’ll always say, telling her about the outings with friends and the dinners with the neighbours and the freezer full of meals cooked by well-meaning church league ladies who want to help look after him.
“Good, good,” she’ll always reply, telling him about the long hours at work and the new car they’ve bought and the vacation they’re planning to Mexico in January.
But they never talk. Not really.
So he came out to visit, hoping they could talk in person.
But they haven’t.
“Norma was the one she talked to,” he tells me, the radio voice breaking a little. “She never could talk to me. She was always such a good girl, but we never had anything to say to each other. Now, without Norma …”
His voice trails off – people’s voices really do that, I notice, it isn’t just a convenient invention of fiction writers who run out of ideas for how to finish sentences.
Unusually for me, I don’t feel compelled to fill the silence with meaningless syllables. I just wait, not talking, for him to finish his thoughts.
He’s worried about Laura.
She’s so much like her mom, he says. Independent and full of opinions – though she’s not right as often as she thinks she is – but warm and loving and kind.
There’s not so much bounce in her step these days, he says. She’s quieter. More subdued.
She’s sad, that much he knows. But he doesn’t know what to say or how to tell her that he’s sad too. That they should be able to be sad together.
He doesn’t know how to tell her.
“Write it down for her,” I hear myself suggest. “When I have trouble saying something, I usually write a letter.”
But he shakes his head.
“I tried that,” he tells me quietly. “But everything I write seems wrong. I never had much of a way with words.”
What I did then surprises me even now.
Usually, my interest in other people’s problems is minimal, and I sure as hell don’t make it a habit to go out of my way to soothe the woes of strangers.
But something about Radio Voice – and I still don’t know his name – made me do it.
“Then let me do it for you,” I say.
He looks startled – as well he might be, since as far as he’s concerned I’m just the Serving Wench who’s brought him two double doubles in two days.
“I’m a journalism student,” I tell him. “And I like to write. Let me try.”
And I add, I kid you not, in the nicest and sweetest and most pleading tone I have ever used in my life: “Please.”
Maybe it was the pleading tone. Maybe he liked my smile. Or maybe he was just so desperate that any idea, no matter how lame, was better than nothing.
But he ended up agreeing. And we worked out a deal.
I’d write it out – how we met, what he told me, what he wanted to tell his daughter – and then I’d e-mail it to her.
He didn’t want to see it first, he said. Which I found a little odd, but he said that if he read it first he’d probably second-guess himself.
“I trust you,” he said in the quiet tone I’d become so used to hearing by then.
And I hate to admit it, but those are the nicest three words anyone’s ever said to me.
He stayed for awhile drinking coffee – I poured him a fresh cup, and I even brought him a piece of carrot cake on the house to go with it.
I went back to work.
He waved when he left. But he didn’t say anything else.
He hasn’t been back in since.
I wonder if he thought I’d really do it.
This is all wrong, of course.
It wasn’t like that at all. I’m not that sassy and your dad’s not that quiet. Probably we both made a lot less sense than I’ve made this sound, made a lot more of those meaningless noises we all use as conversation-fillers. There were probably lots of pauses and gaps and leaps in thought that just wouldn’t translate to the page at all.
Besides, I did it all wrong. I should’ve started in the middle, with some witty anecdote from your childhood or some poignant memory of your mom.
And I gave myself too big a part. I’m not even in this story, really.
But I am now, because he allowed me to be. And because, in a way, we’re all in each other’s stories, aren’t we?
I don’t know a hell of a lot, Laura. And Lord knows you’ve figured out by now that I’m not much of a writer. This jumbled mess of bad description, inane personal observation and failed attempts at witticism will probably convince you that Oprah’s going to be waiting a long time before inviting me on her show.
But the thing is, I do have something to say to you. And that’s really the only point that matters, isn’t it?
He misses your mom.
And he loves you to death.
I don’t know anything else, but those two things I know for absolute certain.
So here it is, for what it’s worth, this story of mine that’s really yours.
You’ve gotta write the ending now.
Make it a good one. Your dad deserves it.
And so, I suspect, do you.
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